Even though they were reared amid San Francisco’s lo-fi bonanza, it didn't take too long for the Fresh & Onlys to opt out of the garage rock arms race. On the Bay Area quartet’s 2012 LP, Long Slow Dance, it swapped lo-fi gristle for nu-romantic vibes, pairing up singer Tim Cohen’s surreal but self-conscious lyrics with shimmering, Smiths-like guitar riffs. But if you expected jangle-pop ebullience while approaching “Bells of Paonia,” the first single from the band’s fifth full-length, House of Spirits, you might come away feeling a bit confused. The song’s stark, fuzz-bleached minimalism is an inversion of what's expected from the typical Fresh & Onlys track; it's zoned-out, rather than urgent, and the chugging chords are blurred by a generous dose of distortion. The drums have been stripped down to the steady thud of a single kick, and sunshine only sneaks in via the barbershop-style vocal harmonies that buoy the chorus. The shift in style takes a little bit to get used to.
House of Spirits finds the Fresh & Onlys in a gloomy place. It’s a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil. “The point of forgetting is so you can live,” despairs Cohen on the chilly “Animal of One”. “The purpose of living is harder to find.” The Fresh & Onlys’ music has touched on downcast themes before, but in the past, these bummin’ sentiments were often tempered a touch of self-effacing humor. Here, Cohen’s gonzo imagery and weirdo-narratives feel more earnest in their evocation of hard times.
To be fair, there’s been a lot going on for the Fresh & Onlys’ over the last couple of years: most of the band’s San Francisco garage rock comrades have split town, bassist Shayde Sartin’s apartment burned down, and Cohen had a kid and temporarily re-located to an isolated Arizona horse ranch, where he demoed most of the record’s songs. On prior LPs, the rest of the band—Sartin, guitarist Wymond Miles, and drummer Kyle Gibson—took Cohen’s home demos and pushed them into headier territory, transforming a mostly acoustic track like "Tropical Island Suite" into the 7-minute centerpiece from 2010’s Play It Strange. On House of Spirits, the divide between the singer's folksier solo output and his work with Fresh & Onlys has gotten a little harder to spot. With it’s clean guitars and bobbing rhythm, “Ballerina” could have easily slotted into River of Souls, Cohen's latest effort with his side project Magic Trick.
On the second half of House of Spirits, the mood leavens a bit. "Hummingbird" and "April Fools" find Fresh & Onlys sounding a little more like their old selves—and if the bulk of House of Spirits is lacking a bit of urgency, the band compensates in other ways. When they were still recording the bulk of their music at home, the Fresh & Onlys worked fast and as a result it sometimes seemed like the clock was working against Cohen’s lyrics, which recycled or smudged only a few words from verse to verse. House of Spirits, then, contains some of his most uniquely weird and vivid work, whether he's contemplating supernatural-style domestic unrest on "Home is Where" or reconciling abandonment issues with a demonic possessor on "Who Let the Devil". Album closer "Madness" finds Cohen reflecting on an LP's worth of emotional unrest with a touch of nostalgia. "Madness has a heart, letting me rejoice in the most peculiar things," he sings. "Your occurrence in my heart, giving me a voice, is the most beautiful thing."
When the Fresh & Onlys' released their first 7" back in 2009, the band was preoccupied with scuzzy psych-rock homage. Since then, they've covered more grounds than most of their Bay Area peers, swapping in stylistic nods to the gothy end '80s LA punk and '80s UK guitar rock. House of Spirits doesn't bring much in the way of sonic surprises beyond a few drum machines and synths, but it does find the band making subtle changes to its M.O., delivering a set of songs that's less urgent, but—in a freaky-yet-endearing way—more personal.
