REVIEWS AND PRESS:

"Funny songwriters are rare. Profound songwriters are rarer. A profound funny songwriter is a miracle. For his fifth solo album, Injured While Faking Own Death, multi-instrumentalist Joe Rut combines pitch-perfect singing with pitch-perfect comic timing. When Rut sets you up for the joke and primes you with the rhyme, I defy any listener to predict what the next line will be. His lyrical associations are so astonishing, he manages to overshadow the feat that, despite giving credit to nine studio musicians, Rut plays most of the instruments....The final song "The Horse I Rode In On," ascends to firework heights of brilliance so jaw-dropping it provokes comparisons to-- dare I speak the blasphemy?-- the young Dylan....It's a Dantesque epic told in the voice of a cornpone Mark Twain character, and I still haven't told you what's ingenious about it yet: every single couplet is funny....Just before the character is reincarnated, he says, "Here's where we learn the price of being what we are," which is the best way to sum up the theme of Rut's record. Being human is painful, paradoxical, and hilarious, and if you ever meet the Buddha, he just might sing like Joe Rut. Listen to this record and laugh, because the joke's on us". -Joe Quirk, Caught in the Carousel.com

"..bruising alt-country..." -SF Weekly

"[lumper/splitter] offers audio embryonic fluid in which to float/gestate...their out there hodge-podge of spacey sounds is underpinned by a sly/left-field sense of humor." -Good Times, Santa Cruz

"..I just don't know why you have to play so LOUD, is all..." -Joe's Mom

"I like the bleeps and blips, theremins, tweaked guitars and general Plan 9 From Outer Space feel of [lumper'splitter's] music. And no, not for background sound while I'm getting a massage, either ... it's too important and too finely crafted for that. What this is, folks, is music as theory and not as toe-tapping hootenanny. Naturally, some people likes the beach novels and some people likes the Russian novels -- in Russian. L/S's music is decidedly the latter, but the fact that people bother to experiment with music at all is a root cause of indie and root reason why you might just want to put down the new Madonna record and see what our musical geeks are coming up with. You never know -- one man's sputter of static could be another man's "Rites of Spring." And that man could be you. -Todd Bemis, Indie-Music.com

"...uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..." -some fucked-up guy at Burning Man