The San Francisco band, The Fresh & Onlys, was the last band playing at the Echo on Thursday night, closing the night with their psychedelic guitars and dreamy melodies. San Francisco must be a good pool for this kind of sound if you consider the numerous psych garage bands coming out of this city (I saw Ty Segal and Thee Oh Sees not too long ago, and loved them both), but each of them is nevertheless a variation of the next one’s sound.
As this pool becomes more and more crowded, it is more and more difficult to differentiate them, but the Fresh & Onlys could lean more toward the folk side of this category, something obvious if you listen to them on record, but something far less obvious if you see them live: they were loud and their folky side was definitively well wrapped up by aggressive guitars and the numerous assaults of Wymond Miles, who was constantly using his pedals, turning the songs into some stretched surfing psychedelia without messing up too much his pompadour hairdo.
Wearing a yellow trucker cap, frontman Tim Cohen arrived on stage making a V with his fingers, and they started their set with ‘D.Y.’ and ‘Invisible Forces’ off their 2009 ‘Grey-Eyed Girls’, which sounded furious compared to the album versions. Their sound was multi-textured and layered with a mix of retro and modern, occasional twanging guitars and Cohen’s buried and blasé vocals. Some good examples of this were the pounding-drummed ‘I Saw Him’, from their self-titled album, the bright and swirling ‘Waterfall’, or the totally Byrds-esque ‘Summer of Love’ from their latest album ‘Play it Strange’. It was funny how they managed to capture this 60s sound without being redundant, and you could definitively appreciate these guys' good ear for the sort of melodies almost coming right from a spaghetti western, fast galloping before unleashing more tumult and distortion (‘The Delusion of Man’) or showing up a punkier side (‘Save your soul’ and ‘Peacock and wing’).
The Fresh & Onlys’ songs sounded diverse and unique at the same time, producing one propulsive rhythm after another, over great and sunny melodies. It is insane to think how many bands can be described by this same idea of 60-inspired psychedelic garage-rock of surfing guitars, whereas it is quite difficult to pinpoint each time which exact points a band has made its own… one thing is sure, The Fresh & Onlys owned this ability to play flawlessly these eclectic and catchy songs, and this beats any wordy description as it was pure entertainment.
Setlist
D.Y.
Invisible Forces
I saw Him
Waterfall
Summer of love
Secret laws
Be my hooker
Feelings in my heart
Dreaming is easy
Wash over us
The Delusion of Man
Save your soul
Peacock and wing