Published in the Quad-City Times on Jan. 26, 2024

Kevin Paller is calculated and calculating. 

You might think the 30-year-old songwriter-guitarist for Rock Island-based indie band Frozen Fructose Laundromat would be decisively right-brained.

After all, Paller plucked his band’s name straight from a teenage memory, one where he drank a root beer float at a laundromat in East Moline.

Creativity consumes the Frozen Fructose Laundromat frontman. That much is clear.  Music has been a passion of Paller’s since he first fell in love with singing radio hits by Ray Charles and Fleetwood Mac. He’s also an avid reader, particularly of authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Virginia Woolf, though he couldn’t get more than a few pages into George Orwell’s famous “1984” because the dystopia was so immersive it was overwhelming. 

But Paller is also mathematical — he once studied at the University of Illinois and applied for their engineering program. The first item on his list of non-musical hobbies is contemplation about physics and arithmetic.

What exactly does mathematics as a hobby look like? 

“It’s just trying to further my understanding of the nature of the universe,” he said, sitting with his arms cautiously folded on an afternoon visit to Radicle Effect Brewerks in Rock Island.

He pauses before each word, picking his verbiage in casual conversation with a lyrical attention to detail. 

“If the math’s not right, then it doesn’t feel all that great.”

Paller, who once played in Quad-Cities rock act Pollinators, is proof that left-brain and right-brain are not mutually exclusive. That balance radiates from Frozen Fructose Laundromat’s debut album “Her Eyes In Horizons,” released in 2022, a record with lyrics that pivot from questions about astronomy to answers of introspection.

“My words tend to hydroplane,” goes one line on “Big and Little Dippers.”

Paller’s songwriting savvy is back again on Frozen Fructose Laundromat’s new record, “A Comma Date,” releasing digitally and on CD on Saturday. The new album’s title has less explicit significance than the band’s moniker — Paller says he picked it mainly for the clever wordplay — but the songs are still sincere. 

“A Comma Date” has been in the works for two years, and while thematically the record isn’t too far off from the band’s previous work, Paller said the writing process was more collaborative between him, drummer Treva Bresin and bass guitarist Robert Rosenstiel. 

“We don’t make it a job,” Paller said of his chemistry writing alongside Bresin and Rosenstiel. 

It probably helps that, outside of music, the band members work jobs that stand in stark contrast to songwriting: Rosenstiel is a lawyer, Bresin a software engineer.

Paller, who works in construction, says the band’s day jobs don’t seep into the songwriting. But he says his taste in music doesn’t either, a semi-deliberate decision. Paller can’t remember the last show he saw in town (though it’s been at least a few months, he says), and he avoids listening to too much music, weary that his lyricism may come out sounding copycat if he wears his influences too proudly. 

Paller’s heard Frozen Fructose Laundromat’s comparisons — “chilled out Dinosaur Jr.,” Neil Young and Crazy Horse with a bit of Billy Joel — but relishes that the band can’t be pinned down to one genre or direct parallel. 

“I’m glad we’re a derivative of what inspires us, rather than copying somebody,” he said. 

“Denver Moon,” from the new record, interpolates a riff by Thelonious Monk. The band will play “A Comma Date” and a few of their older tracks at an album release show Saturday night at Rozz-Tox. The show starts at 8 p.m., with doors opening at 7 p.m. The opener will be local tongue-in-cheek rock band Del Rockford. Entry at the door is $10 in cash. 

While it is certainly a solid pun, “A Comma Date” does feel like an apt title for an album written by Paller. His worldview, as shared from a barstool at a local nanobrewery, is equal parts comma and date: quantifiable and linguistic, punctual with punctuation.

Hours before Frozen Fructose Laundromat’s gig practice this week, Paller planned to hang around at the bar for a bit. He hoped to find a partner for a few rounds of billiards, a sport built for those with a knack for both geometry and instinct. Lately, it’s been one of Paller’s favorite hobbies.