Orange Like Me: Mr. Time – album review

Orange Like Me

Mr. Time

DL/Cass (Bandcamp)

Out now

Brian Nupp revisits his younger self for new album.

Toledo native Brian Nupp, who has worked with artists like Bid and Lester Square (Monochrome Set), and Jeff Nelson (Minor Threat), has released albums under the name Lazerlove5, has been digging into his past for this latest release. All the songs on this album are what Brian describes as orphans: ‘a mix of songs evolved from a journal I started keeping with me on campus in 1991. I kept writing and sometimes recording on a 4 track cassette recorder and other devices, left unfinished. None of them fit together. So essentially this is a bunch of orphaned songs telling a tale over 30 years time.’

Brian has also resurrected the name he took for his first solo outings. It’s origins? Orange Like Me, the name came from me having very ginger/orange hair when I was a teenager and I said something to my roommate like “well, you’re not orange like me” and he said: “Orange Like Me…. haha! That should be the name of your band…”

The songs on the album have a British psychedelic feel with some 60s rock and pop vibes thrown in and delivers a crazy rewarding trip through the younger Nupp’s songwriting skills. Mr Time, with its sound of office daydreaming, Mud Mask Mama, with its dreamlike Syd Barrett lyrics, and Stonehenge, a trip of dreamy space-age sounds in the stratosphere, all have that psychedelic groove of Pink Floyd and Beatles circa Sgt Pepper or the White Album.  There are the more laid-back grooves of Honey Bee, which so expertly evokes lazy summer days that you can feel the sun on your skin, and Dr Fang, which is a downbeat melancholic tale of a mad scientist (I think!). Orange Like Me also deliver up a sinister cartoon-like tune relating the story of a villain: Mr Krempel, Car Wreck which has a hint of a reggae beat with stream of consciousness lyrics, the dramatic Room 1101 (is this way scarier than Room 101?), the wonderful 60s pop of Thicket which discuss…well, insects to be found in a thicket, all culminating in the album closer, an elegiac and thoughtful piece, Someone’s Past.

The album was mixed by Chris Stamey of the dB’s, who also plays on a couple of tracks, and also features the late, much-missed bass player Matthew Seligman.

This is a psychedelic trip back in time where Brian Nupp takes his younger self’s lyrics and adds his present self’s music. It’s a journey that includes sinister characters, cartoon villains and weird scenes inside Toledo.

You can find Orange Like Me on Bandcamp.

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All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Twitter, Instagram and WordPress

Source: louderthanwar.com