The Fresh & Onlys formed just last year in San Francisco, but they already boast more music to their name than most bands manage in twice that time. Over the course of a flurry of 7"s, a limited-edition cassette, and two full-length albums-- last spring's self-titled and now Grey-Eyed Girls-- you can hear the sound of a young band busily honing in on what they're good at. In case you weren't tipped off by their almost distractingly evocative band name (should we be thinking of the Only Ones, or the Young Fresh Fellows?), the Fresh & Onlys traffic in jangly garage-pop, balancing psych-rock swagger with generous dollops of sweetly cockeyed melody. Their recordings are lovingly caked with crud, and their jams sometimes veer perilously close to derailing completely*,* which might seem to lump them in with other San Francisco psych revivalists like Thee Oh Sees and Sic Alps. But the Fresh & Onlys are set apart by an endearingly fussy devotion to songcraft and an understated and unfakeable weirdness. Their self-titled record was fairly straightforward but satisfying garage rock; Grey-Eyed Girls is stranger and more interesting, toning down the swagger and finding a sweet spot somewhere in between uptempo brashness and the quirky vulnerability of Beat Happening.
If the Fresh & Onlys come off as more winsome than your average Nuggets fetishists, part of that might have something to do with their diffident rhythm section, which ensures that they wobble more often than they rock. "What's His Shadow Still Doing Here" is a classic piece of Buddy Holly yearning that drags and nearly trips over its own feet, gaining in poignancy and charm whatever it loses in a steady backbeat. "No Second Guessing", meanwhile, comes off like a handmade valentine straight from Calvin Johnson: "Be strong, be wise/ Don't ever question your place in my life," Tim Cohen warbles in his unsteady baritone. "Dude's Got a Tender Heart", for its part, is a bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold tale that echoes the Crystals' "He's a Rebel" over a tin-can approximation of girl-group pop: "You wouldn't know if you looked at him/ But dude's got a tender heart."
There are a handful of killer straight-ahead rave-ups as well: The spectacularly catchy "I'm Gonna Be Your Elevator" bops along on its "I'm gonna lift you up/ I'm gonna bring you down" chorus chant, while "D.Y." supplies the Yardbirds-style barn-burner. But the most intriguing numbers branch out into more wigged-out territory, like the B-movie paranoia of "Invisible Forces" or "Clowns (Took My Baby Away)", the title of which requires no further elucidation. These little weirdo touches help distinguish the Fresh & Onlys from their San Francisco brethren*,* and throughout Grey-Eyed Girls, their possibly unhealthy familiarity with garage-rock arcana is balanced out by a keen songwriter's eye, and their obsession with the past is elevated by genuine affection and love.
