Apple Brains – Get Fruity!

Price: €11.00

Super-catchy lo-fi indie-rock songs about fruit and vegetables. After hearing “Apple x3″ first I drove Niamh crazy by constantly singing it:

Me: “Apple apple apple growing in a tree …”

Her: “STOP! STOP! You’ll put me off the song before I even hear it properly!”

It was harder to stop than you’d think, I’d suddenly realise I was singing “App ..” and think “Oh no! I’m doing it again” and snap my mouth shut half way through the first word before Niamh could give me a Stern Look.

There’s a cool kinda home-made feel to this CD. Niamh reckons it sounds like The Moldy Peaches doing Sesame Street, which I guess means the songs are very (very!) singalong-able and the production tends towards the spontaneous rather than the slick, like it was recorded on a budget by musicians intent on enjoyment rather than perfection. The lyrics are more fun, and less preachy, than you’d expect from a record that deliberately sets out to extol the virtues of healthy eating, and the song titles are brilliant – “Tomatoes are so wonderful they make me want to cry”, for example, or “A mango is a precious egg to be cherished”. Isabelle’s funny bone is tickled bigtime by the occasional silly voices and crazy sound effects, as well as, oddly, the line “Jump up and down/Because potatoes are brown” in “Lots of different colors”. She also likes to make up her own imaginary vegetables for the empty singalong verses in the same song, and to dance madly to “Growing like crazy” as it gets faster and faster and FASTER. I love the little variations on the indie-rock template – there’s a waltz in here, plus an occasional appearance from a latin-sounding horn section. It’s the tunes though that really make the whole CD stand out – irresistibly melodic and heaps of fun.