Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Baby FuzZ, Blanket Fort 2021.
With a name like Baby FuzZ I wasn’t sure what to expect from this seven track mini-LP however it turns out to have little to do with babies or fuzz, other than the possibility of the baby fuzz that appears on male chins during puberty.
Baby FuzZ is the alter-ego of American artist Sterling Fox (he does look young) who first appeared on the music scene back in 2017 when he was credited as co-writer for a number of A-list recording artists such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, Max Martin and others.
However, with the election of Donald Trump he promptly disappeared from the American scene and moved to Montreal Canada (I suspect that many others thought about doing the same thing).
A year later he re-emerged as Baby FuzZ, a sort of glam-rock meets indie/alternative outfit, and throughout 2018 began releasing a series of singles online that quickly developed a following.
It’s difficult to describe Baby FuzZ’s music other than to say it’s eclectic.
There are bits of everything thrown together as he genre-hops from pop to punk, folk to rock and everything in between.
From the opening track, Welcome To The Future, we enter a dystopian America seen through the eyes of Kevin and Karen, young suburbanites throwing a party as their over-polluted environment chokes their guests.
The album was made while Stirling was in quarantine in Los Angeles and Trump, the pandemic, environmental degradation, and the associated malaise must have been weighing heavily on his mind.
As variable as the music is, the lyrics are equally weird as Fox writes from the perspective of our above-mentioned suburbanites and an orca and also a mobile phone.
In the song We’re All Gonna Die!!! He outlines all the ways we can die and in Acid Night, a somewhat unsettling ambient piece, he sings about taking acid at a Dodgers ball game.
You probably get the idea that there’s a fair level of absurdity in the album but there are some serious concerns about the direction that we’re heading underlying it all.
The critics have been quick to praise the album. EARMILK claims that it “grabs us by the throat and tugs ferociously at our heartstrings” and Buzzbands called it “crushingly gorgeous music with heavy symbolism.”
