There seems to be a measure of good intention throughout the songs on the band's latest, 'Echo Kid,' as well as the unreleased songs played in this session, that bring to mind the misguided, but healthy rebelliousness that arrives and then - after so long - passes. It's a preoccupation with trying to have something that resembles fun and it's just better to fake the enjoyment part than to really be without it.

And if he's not the only one - if there are hundreds of thousands more like him - maybe he's not having fun at all. Stein sings about the doctor warning that he's having too much fun (we hear it as tongue-in-cheek - all this fun) and the singer commenting that if he's having all kinds of fun, he's not the only one. The songs are sonic rip-snorters, peelings out of tires and have the feel of classic garage rock meets the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Turbo Fruits provide mayhem and recreational drug use and abuse, craziness and forced euphoria under the guise of good clean fun or as an understandable pastime. It's woven into the fabric of the band's music and still, even when lead singer Jonas Stein is commenting on a mother/his mother being mad cause her boy fried his brain on drugs, it's mostly for dramatic effect, the kind of story that's all bluster and comedy (like the Ramones singing about lobotomies) rather than a telltale sign of the kind of people they are. We tend to believe that Turbo Fruits have discovered their fair share of narcotics and various means to getting messed up. It affects them in all kinds of ways, but so do other substances. Once it gets into them, all hell breaks loose and the music that gets created is equal parts human and that natural powerhouse of energy that was just gulped down as if it were a shot of tequila, not a burning hot comet.

You can look at them and see it as it travels down the throat and into the digestive tract, shooting off its tantrums and going berserk as it's being consumed. What the fellas in the Nashville band Turbo Fruits do with their lightning is they chase it, pink belly it, taunt it, get it hammered and then they swallow it. What would anyone do with it then? You'd just get sad looking at it and you'd let it out to rage on its own again, rumbling off through the night, splitting trees and dinging weathervane roosters. It's a selfish plot and one that is as stupid as it is unattainable, because dammit if that lightning would do you any good cracking and bucking in that glass container with that lid or cork stoppering it up. People use it to describe what it would be like to corral magic, or unattainable energy and then lock it away so that it could be yours whenever the fuck you'd like it.

There is that phrase of mythical proportions, the idea of catching lightning in a bottle.

Turbo fruits