Album Review: FRIGS Make You Analyze Your “Basic Behavior”
You always hear that the best thing you can give someone is the truth. Whether that is true is debatable, but, for FRIGS’ front-woman Bria Salmena, it felt necessary. Making her band’s debut was a deeply personal experience, where she looked into her Basic Behavior.
We all have pathos or behavioral patterns in our life that could take years to lose, if at all.Salmena’s voice “Joan Jetts” through this truth like a leather-clad maven bashing emotional walls with a jack-hammer. Her vocals remind me of Jett and Pat Benatar, and their capacity to husk their voice like a she-wolf barking at that many moons that has defined her darker nights. While FRIGS’ arrange their music to have a lax, lo-fi undercurrent to its sound, there is an inherent exhilaration to Selman’s voice that makes you feel like you can jump-rope even to their lowest chords.
Tracks like, “Trashyard”, “Chest”, “Solid State”, and “Waste” are lyrical bath-houses in how watered you can feel by negative feelings. After all, negative sentiments are the foundation to negative decisions, which is an obvious connection that I, oddly, missed until I heard Basic Behavior. You course through songs such as, “Heavyweights” and “Gemini”, and enter the ranged logic individuals form as they grapple between self-confidence and self-destruction. It was as if I “knew” this truth, but hearing the captioned stories FRIGS calls songs allowed me to realize the lesson. Again, because they have an electric, lo-fi sound, their words zip through their songs like a spaceship flying through stars, and leaving you eager to go on hyper-drive.Yet, it is that capacity to make you want more of FRIGS that turns Basic Behavior into a smart debut.
Your first record is a tricky thing. On one hand, you want to blow everyone out of the water, but, on that other, you cannot leave nothing for the next, sophomore swim. In essence, you have to seduce the listener enough to want to musically date you again. FRIGS succeed by creating hypnotic melodies that become treasure-chests forSalmena’s self-truths. In basing their record on “emotional honesty”, it will never musically tire, and leaves FRIGS with an opportunity to grow and offer more truths in future albums. For More Information on FRIGS and TO Buy BASIC BEHAVIOR on February 23 Click Here.
