Frigs

Basic Behaviour

The album art for FRIGS’ Basic Behaviour — digitally designed by Toronto artist Olenka Szymonski — features a nude woman chained with her arm twisted backwards, in an aquarium with calla lilies floating around her. This uncomfortable visual mixture of vulnerability and disturbed beauty is truly befitting of FRIGS’ debut. Swirling in the blackened mix are Bria Salmena’s lyrics, speaking to her experiences as a woman fronting a band, and personal struggles. Her ferocity and strength shine here, with vocals sung one moment and caterwauled the next. Add in the command the band have on structure, mood and method — a brittle twinge of guitar here, a swell on the brink of bursting there — and you’ve got something to behold. Meticulously put together over a 16-month stretch, split between Union Sound in Toronto’s East end and the band’s home studio space, FRIGS managed to not muck it up. They cast the net and caught it. “Waste” features a slow gurgle to life, and satisfyingly switches up the tempo at the halfway point, moving seamlessly from hazy to hectic. “Gemini” whirrs into motion, sounding like the soundtrack to a dream, hypnotically looping and offering reprieve from the ebb and flow of the guitars and drums.

“II” dissolves into almost a sermon, and finds Salmena stating plainly, “This is shit and I am nothing, I am naked and you are prodding,” which thematically exists in the same world as the incredible “Chest,” which speaks to the disgusting 2015 Brock Turner rape case. Repetition in lyrics throughout Basic Behaviour amplifies the anxiety and restlessness that fuels the record. It begins to feel like an interrogation, the need to know, the frustration and a thirst for clarity. The melodies reflect these pangs, too, as the guitars twitch or tremble, trying to make sense of it all. (Arts and Crafts, www.arts-crafts.ca)