Tagged with " Bleeding Gold Records"
Alligator Indian – “Dark Fruit”
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There are many things to love about Alligator Indian, but the cherry on top of it all has to be the duo’s willingness to go anywhere and try anything. I’ll admit that when I was first getting acquainted with their music after the release FOOTBALL it took me a minute to tune into their shape-shifting vibes, but once I did I was enthusiastically sold. It’s not that the band refuses to stick to one style, but rather they see everything as fair game and find a way to bring it in and put their signature stamp on it.
This elusive quality is evidenced quite extensively on their debut LP Spring I’m In. The album won’t be out until next week on Bleeding Gold Records, but until then you can check out the first single “Dark Fruit.” Chosen because it sort of encapsulates the vibe of the album, “Dark Fruit” is a peculiar little monster that pairs the beautiful vocals of Spooky Bubble with Christian Church’s deep almost Gregorian chant. On paper that might sound strange, but true to Alligator Indian form they sell it.
I told Christian to feel free to share anything he wanted about the single. Turns out he did and it’s pretty crazy:
The roots of this song rest in one called ‘Radical Graves’ (which eventually became the name of our Halloween EP). We were working on it shortly before our trio became a duo. It’s one of the few songs we actually constructed together from start to finish and while using a traditional instrument (our piano). We ended up scraping all but the first section, which Spooky began tweaking and coming up with other parts for while crafting the ‘verse’ melody. We honed those in and I improvised some secondary lines which we cleaned up and that gave us the music. Spooky then added the soprano melodies and lyrics which revolve around Dia de los Muertos (a constant inspiration for us). And we wrote the verse lines inspired by this song in Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark by Alvin Schwartz called ‘The Hearse Song’. For the end, I thought it’d be cool if I dropped out and brought a tribal drum beat in. I did something simple and the first time we practiced I started making up lyrics based of some books I saw on the bookshelf (Kingdom Come was one). I then took a few of the words/phrases and refined it to be about all the wildfires we had in Florida growing up (and that they still deal with) and about rebirth and hope in the face of loss. It’s odd that all these elements came together to create a song dealing with so many facets of death from the campy/funny, to the loss of love, to the regrowth of things from the ashes. I’d say our hope for this song and the album would be that despite the seemingly dark tone, people realize how much positivity and humor there is. We enjoy finding amusing elements within ‘dark’ themes, and I think this is a good example of a song that on the surface is heavy and serious but at its core is about renewal and is quite light hearted.
