Got To Get Up And Be Somebody

Black Bananas “TV Trouble”

Black Bananas, the new band featuring Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux, opened up for Sleigh Bells last Friday night. I was pretty excited to see her perform – I have loved Trux for a long time but never saw them in concert, and I quite like this Black Bananas album, much more so than the music she was putting out as RTX. Unfortunately, the performance was a total mess. The songs, so catchy and urgent on record, were pretty much unintelligible on stage. Herrema was charming in a stoned sort of way, but got progressively more loopy and mush-mouthed as the show continued. Sad.

Like a lot of the best Trux material, the songs on Black Bananas’ debut album Bad Times Express IV fall into an appealing midpoint between straight-up classic rock grooves and warped surrealism. “TV Trouble” is essentially a pretty straight forward song, but Herrema’s character and the sound of the recording push it all to a cartoonish extreme. It’s goofy, weird and fun, and very disorienting. It’s like Herrema is just trying to show us all what it’s like in her version of the world. It’s a cool place to visit, for sure.

Buy it from Amazon.