Noise for Zeros

Patty Lane / Story of Life 7″ + comic
Skin Graft Records, 1993

Here’s a 45 that’s gotten better with age. When I first picked up this warped psych monster I was more interested in completing my collection of Skin Graft 7″ + comic combos than listening to the music inside, but it’s become one of my favorite records to spin when I’m in a particularly weird mood. At first take, I considered this Drunks With Guns / Strangulated Beatoffs offshoot band a cut-rate Butthole Surfers clone, probably due to the fact that Fruitcake’s heavily processed, echoed vocals sound a lot like the Butthole’s cover of Donovan‘s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” on Pioughd. But years of putting this on mix tapes (it nicely filled the mandatory oddball track quota) and tossing it on the turntable whenever stumbling across its dayglo orange sleeve, I’ve come to realize that Fruitcake’s grotesquely deranged 1960s psych is weird on an entirely different level than the Butthole Surfers. With the volume and effects-pedal blowout of over-the-top psychers like High Rise and Mainliner and the drugged out charm of classic Roky Erickson / 13th Floor Elevators riffs, Fruitcake pulls off two ridiculously awesome and hilarious (the lyrics to “Story of Life” are an ode to jacking off) tunes that will forever damage your brain.

DOWNLOAD:

Fruitcake – “Patty Lane”
Fruitcake – “Story of Life”

LINKS:

Fruitcake bio and discography on I Heart Noise

Tags: Drunks With Guns, psychedelic, Skin Graft Records, St. Louis, Strangulated Beatoffs, weird

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 10:49 pm and is filed under 1990s. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.