Like a shark that will die if it ever stops swimming in its aquarium constructed of melted educational filmstrips and filled with the spit of a million individual homeless people, James Franco continues to find new areas in which to train his scattershot artistic energies. And when he’s not carving Brad Renfro’s name into his arm or doing something dull and quotidian like starring in and directing motion pictures, he’s also pursuing music in his downtime as one-half of Kalup And Franco, which pairs him with drag-loving performance artist Kalup Linzy in a duo that both inverts and plays off of pop archetypes while crafting its own sly, surrealist bent on traditional lyrical themes. By which we mean it sounds a lot like generic house music with two art-school dudes who can’t really sing doing it anyway, then writing off their ineptitude as some sort of purposeful amateurism commentary on the slickness of modern singles or something.
But whatever, it worked: Their pal DJ /rupture will release Kalup And Franco’s debut EP Turn It Up on his Dutty Artz label on July 12, featuring the songs, “Rising (Both Sides Now)” and “Turn It Up (So We Can Turn It Out).” A third song, “Fly Away,” not only lacks a clever parenthetical, it won’t be included, but Kalup And Franco does plan to make a music video for it along with the two other tracks, because otherwise they would be incomplete works of art, no? You can get a hint of what’s in store in their already-released single, “I Love You,” streaming here, as well as in the below video of the two performing a version of “Proud Mary.” [via Pitchfork]