All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors
Turning Into Small
Gern Blandsten

When bumping into a name like this it's hard to resist checking out what sort of music that is hiding among the citrus fruits. All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors simply beg you to "come taste the band". So, with a Gin and Tonic in one hand, I flip on the record with the other.

All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors (ANLLF from now on... - who released a self-titled debut mini-album on Koombia Records last year) is a quintet out of New Jersey, and label-mates (and state-mates) of the Van Pelt, which I've had the pleasure of getting introduced to earlier. However ANLLF presents some other flavors, or should I say a different menu. Brothers (?) Stephen and Brian Doherty (respectively on guitars, keyboards and vocals, and drums), Joshua Booth (guitars, keyboards, vox), Jeremy Winter (bass guitar, keyboards, vox) and Merc (guitars, keyboards, vox) sound somehow very British, in their icy, wide-screened guitar-and-organ-painted world of sound. Think My Bloody Valentine, Pale Saints, or early Boo Radleys (with-out the hyper-catchyness), and you're somewhere near the neighborhood of ANLLF. Half dreamy, half fairy-taleic, and quite chilled music. Imagine running through the woods over a frosty ground, with misty and dew-dropped spider-webs all around, and the trees "dressed" so tight you can't spot the sky. And you hear elf-like song from above and below and strange sounds out of everywhere at once. Ever been in this dream? It's a bit creepy, not really scaring, but more like being somewhere un-real, in a place you've never been before and yet you somehow know the place.

The sound-scapes of ANLLF are hovering way up, and the blurred vocals are just fragments inside the thick-flowing, but light sound-mass. Their space-pop is fluttering, rising and diving, but not in a drugged-up style like, say, Spacemen 3, with guitars fizzing and jangling, and the keys behaving like a hasty tidal wave. And, yes the vocals are elf-ish, almost transparent, so low-toned that you can hardly tell a word about the lyrical content. Only from the song titles you can get a clue of what this is about, as most of the titles fits well to the musical frontage: Your Imagination, Puzzled Into Pieces, When Things Come Falling, Snowflake Eye, Emergency Turn Off.

All in all Turning Into Small (shrinkage!?) is a fascinating piece of music, a whirlpool of guitars and keyboards, and perfect as we're heading into winter-time. Coolest tracks: Puzzled Into Pieces, Lattershed, and Snowflake Eye. Time for another G & T, aye? Lemon or lime? Yes, both, please.

Contact: The ANL&L Flavors, PO BOX 407, Ringwood, NJ 07456 USA

Copyright © 1998 Håvard Oppøyen