B-Side Guys

Bad Flamingo treats original sin not as mistake but as design feature. “The Fruit” reframes the Fall through deterministic logic that borders on fatalistic: fruit was made for snakes, hands were made to take, ground was made to shake. The masked duo—operating under Oscar Wilde’s principle that masks enable truth—builds folk-rock tension around the idea that our nature never was good, and maybe that’s just the way things work.

The production stays stripped to essentials: vocals, guitar, bass, banjo, autoharp, tambourine divided between “the one on the left” and “the one on the right.” The anonymity serves the material well, removing personality from equations about human nature. When they sing about dancing like flames on wood, about landslides smooth and slick, about drinks leaning till they tip, these aren’t confessions from identifiable individuals but observations about species-level patterns.

The lyrics move through imagery that connects temptation to inevitability. Needing dirt to grow becomes justification for laying low, for accepting that sorries arrive too late by design rather than accident. The repeated insistence that things are “just the way” functions as both acceptance and accusation—acknowledging reality while refusing to soften it with redemption narratives. There’s something almost relieving in the track’s refusal to pretend we’re better than we are, in its recognition that warmth and realness and presence coexist comfortably with taking what we shouldn’t.

The biblical framework gets stripped of moral weight and reimagined as natural law. Snakes don’t corrupt fruit—fruit exists for snakes. Hands don’t choose to take—they’re made for it. The ground doesn’t fail when it shakes—that’s its function. Bad Flamingo presents human nature as amoral mechanism rather than moral failing, which somehow feels more honest than pretending we’re constantly choosing between good and evil.

The masked duo’s invocation of Wilde about truth-telling through disguise proves apt: using folk instrumentation and indie rock structure, they deliver uncomfortable observations about what we actually are beneath the narratives we construct. “The Fruit” doesn’t offer escape routes or suggest improvement is possible. It just documents the mechanics of how we operate, warm and real and right here, taking what’s within reach because that’s what hands do.