Guitars Floating Down The River

Fresh Pepper featuring Dan Bejar “Seahorse Tranquilizer”

The novel conceit of Fresh Pepper’s debut record is that all the songs are in some way set behind the scenes in restaurants. There’s a lot of ways to approach this subject matter in music that would explore the stress and tensions that come up in a restaurant – consider the way the music supervisors of The Bear edited a live recording of Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” into a setpiece depicting a kitchen falling into chaos – but Fresh Pepper instead aim for a lite jazzy vibe so serene and relaxed that it comes across as surreal or sarcastic. A lot of the record feels like an odd dream with a very specific setting, with odd details about “new ways of chopping onions” and “mushrooms in the frying pan” floating by without much context. The aesthetics of this record are heavily indebted to Destroyer’s Kaputt and so Dan Bejar’s presence on “Seahorse Tranquilizer” feels totally natural, maybe even inevitable. Bejar doesn’t quite play along with the album concept but that actually works just fine in the context – he basically sounds like an interesting patron at a fine dining establishment, and the two other voices seem to respond to his presence like servers. They gush to him about how they “harvest insane roses” for the tables, and he seems to humor them while basically lost on his own trip.

Buy it from Bandcamp.