Jonny Fritz obviously loves hot dogs in any shape or form. He started his singing/songwriting and recording career under the name Jonny Corndawg (get it?) and on this, his third album (first under his real name), “Sweet Creep” includes a song named “Chilidog Morning”.
Based on this outing (I have not had a chance to hear the “Corndawg” stuff), all those hot dogs have had a strange, but ultimately good influence on Fritz’s musical career. “Sweet Creep” album came out of left field, and stayed there. In a good way.
What Fritz is doing (with production help of, among others, Jim James) is something you can call “weird country”, in some ways akin to more “straightforward” stuff of Bonnie Prince Billy, or Handsome Family, or the tongue in cheek stuff of Daniel Romano (before he decided he wants to be Bob Dylan circa ’66).
On the first hearing, you might be deceived by what seem standard country musical chops. But then you start peeling the lyrics and all those somewhat convoluted stories start taking shape. Something in the manner David Lynch constructed “Twin Peaks”. To make the comparison even stronger (an to mix up things musical here and there), Fritz seems inspired by the opening riff to Angelo Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” title theme in “Forever Whatever”, one of the album’s highlights.
It also seems that all the songs, with their seemingly bright and sparkly structures portray personal dark themes. But wherever you start playing the album, you have the feeling you are in an usual Nashville bar, with a nagging feeling that not everything is the way it should be. Maybe it was too much mustard or chilli on those hot dogs. Or maybe it was just too much personal pain. Whatever the combination, Jonny Fritz has given us a musically seemingly usual “unusual” country album. And it sounds good.
