Mr. Tube and the Flying Objects: Listen Up

Pall Jenkins had me going for a minute there. You see, the backstory on his new musical discovery says that Jenkins met Mr. Tube, a.k.a. Freddie Dillinger of Freddie Feelgood and the Real Good Feelings, when Mr. Tube was fixing Jenkins’ TV. They got to talking, Dillinger said that he had over 100 unrecorded songs, Jenkins said he’d record them, and the rest is history. Oh, and Dillinger also invented the bendy straw. Seriously! His bio says so! The internets wouldn’t lie, would they? Well… more likely is the description offered on Sweet Nothing Records’ website, that says, simply, “Black Heart Procession frontman Pall Jenkins has a new side project called Mr. Tube and the Flying Objects.” Mr. Tube’s debut album Listen Up finds a laid back, mariachi-influenced southern blues-rock band with a sense of humor, as influenced by song titles like “Jesus was a Vato” and lyrics (still referring to Jesus here) like “I only drink Mexican beer”. There’s a lo-fi sound, surely to play up the vintage “source” of these tracks, but the ill-advised presence of new-wave electronics in some of the latter tracks distracts from the illusion and the overall sound. Still, when you’ve got something as downright funky as the hip-hop (by way of Beck)-influenced “Brothers in a Bind”, you can afford a misstep or two. Mr. Tube might not actually be a television repairman, but the potential tapped on Listen Up is enough to make a listener hope he gets around to releasing a few more of those 90-odd songs he hasn’t yet expunged from the vault.