Fl. Oz.

Vegetable Kingdom (Spongebath)
by Jamie Kiffel

From its first glib gliss, the lively, personable piano on Fl. Oz.‘s new EP, Vegetable Kingdom, takes a flying leap into the musical primelight, dancing audacious circles around its player’s flagrantly uncooperative lyrics. Vocalist/pianist Seth Timbs’ jazzy piano bounds into rousing melodies, recalling an upright Louisiana player piano banging out reams of ’20s sheet music. The only hints of shade in the buoyant “Vegetable Kingdom,” where one finds “the loveliest sights that your eyes have ever spied upon,” are in briefly atonal wormholes where Timbs’ piano wriggles out a nervously rising tremolo. Excepting this, a jubilant head-bopper would need a full cabbage-to-the-head assault to pluck short his visions of Magic Garden reruns and awaken him to the song’s dastardly subliminal emotional DDT. “Down in the well, maybe you drowned there, or maybe you fell,” sings Timbs happily. Round, flexible jazz chords turn and roll in “Sitting Beside Myself,” in which the singer happily recalls young love wintered rotten, with such troubling lines as “Leaves and insects flew at my head… I think our ships may have sailed off the flat Earth, and fallen away.” I expect a pilsner full of dollar bills to materialize on the edge of my stereo as the disc goes on to celebrate another destroyed relationship, remarking lightly, “As old Father Time hangs us up on his clothesline, he says, ‘Lend me your ears, or lay down your lives.'” “Stick in the Mud” grinds an electric guitar against Timbs’ piano, rupturing the disc’s jubilantly jazzy theme with a flannel-rending grunge jag; evidently these last few drops have pooled stagnant inside this guitar since the Nirvana supply cut-off. Vegetable Kingdom ends with a midnight Gotham bar tune or ’30s detective story love theme in which a barbershop quartet harmonizes on the rainy streetcorner behind Dick Tracy, mourning his cruel lady love. We can face the music and dance, but can this music partner with its legume lyrics? As long as romance decays in a bright garden of failed fruits, I’ll crush Prozac in my applesauce.
(101 North Maple Street Murfreesboro, TN 37130)