by Matt Watton (@brotinus)
Oakland, CA’s Fake Fruit are back with their sophomore record, Mucho Mistrust. They set the bar high with their 2021 self-titled debut and, to nobody’s surprise, they’ve cleared that bar. Still present is the marriage of scraggly guitars and unrelenting melody, stark vocals and powerful full-band swells. At times on the debut, you could hear the band ironing out the kinks in their songwriting practice, with the skeletal song structure from frontperson Hannah D’Amato poking through the layers of fuzz, grunge, and groove her bandmates had applied. The new record sounds like a more organic whole from a band who has grown together, feeding each other’s strengths and challenging themselves to be more.
These songs approach the platonic ideal of alt-rock brilliance, making old cliches feel fresh again while blindsiding you with unexpected twists and turns. The title track leans into loud-quiet dynamics (you gotta love when the guitars drop out on the second verse), with a swayable but odd-feeling groove. Then they hit the brakes with a jammy section before slamming the gas into the final chorus that knocks you into the back of your seat. “Well Song” fuses the Pixies, Velvet Underground, and Teenage Fanclub, with a crisp bass line, skronky guitar work, and a pounding, heavy chorus. These songs swelter with guitar distortion without ever overwhelming you, and mid-tempo tunes like “Too Soon” and “Ponies” are moody, catchy, and slick. The closest Fake Fruit gets to “shoegaze” is “Cause of Death,” which could be a Wednesday song if you swapped the sax part for pedal steel.
More enticing than their alt-rock awesomeness are the tunes that embrace a no-wave, off-kilter noisiness. “Gotta Meet You” is straight James Chance worship, with tinny guitar stabs and jittery saxophone squeals under siren-esque vocal squawks. The interplay of D’Amato and Alex Post on guitar keeps things spicy. It’s infectious how their guitars go from duking it out to melding together on the spastic bop “See It That Way” and the caustic ripper “Psycho.” These are punk songs that are engrossing, with new guitar parts and licks one after another. They reject the machismo of the guitar solo without sacrificing any of the energy or rapturousness that fans of guitar music crave.
D’Amato’s voice is compelling, it feels familiar and intimate but also secretive. She vacillates between speak-singing and sing-singing, and at all times sounds effortless and emotive. Songs are confessional and righteously vitriolic, whether through narrative diary-fragment lyrics (“Mas o Menos,” “Mucho Mistrust”) or the unrelenting and relatable repetition of “I tried and tried and tried” (“Well Song”). Post takes on lead vocals on “Venetian Blinds,” a catchy tune about modern malaise, and the female-male vocal blending on “Long Island Iced Tea” is as charming as it is crucial.
Fake Fruit took three years between albums. They may not have struck while the iron was hot, but the embers were clearly still burning. They’ve genuinely taken what was best about their earlier work and made it even better, a masterful blend of rock influences that still comes out sounding wholly unique. A good second album lives up to the promises of the first, but a great one makes even bigger promises for what’s to come.