Artist: Frayex
Album: Subjective Dustbin
Recorded and Mixed at: Crypto Cipher Audio Lab, New Delhi
Label: Independent
Release Date: 2013
It was no more than my usual day when I received this particular band’s request for a review. I clicked on the link which they provided and started listening to their music. It started off with a pretty impressive riff and I liked the band. While the song streamed, I was going through the band’s profile and I was suddenly shocked when I came across their picture… THEY WERE YOUNG! So young that they are probably not even allowed to watch an R-rated movie!
Meet Frayex – A four piece Alternative Metal band from Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. They have been rocking the college and school crowds around the capital city since 2011 with their catchy, upbeat and astonishingly delightful music. Apart from playing at a bunch of college and school festivals and thrashing up some local venues, these maniacs have already come out with an album, titled ‘Subjective Dustbin’, which totally grips your ear from its very first listen. As they say, being young “doesn’t stop them from playing HARD.”
‘Subjective Dustbin’ offers us an amazing blend of pumped-up groovy riffs and some hard-hitting progressions wrapped perfectly in a blanket of the Seattle sound. Tracks like ‘Abscissa’ and ‘Blank Eyes’ consists of quite thrilling and fuel-pumped riffs that rushes your blood to the head and gets you straight to headbanging. The riffs on verses and choruses are pretty catchy and grungy in nature, indicative of their huge influence of Nirvana. In fact even the vocals by Arjun follow a very Cobain-esque pattern with screams swiftly leading the song to a high energy chorus where he would just shout with a cracky voice and still turn out to be marvellous. The only thing that keeps him away is his voice which needs to mature and gain a bit of harshness and virility.
A good thing about the record is that it has a constant sound and persistent level of energy and yet the riffs display a lot of variedness. For instance, ‘Burnout’ is filled with early 80s heavy metal tracks, especially with the intro which blows up with a thrashy palm muted progression and moves on to an intense verse, like a punchy Motörhead track, whereas ‘Agony Of Comprehension’ kicks off with a cult bass line, the kind we find in thriller movie in car chase scenes which proceeds to feature the same riff on distorted guitars, only to make the song more adrenaline rushing. The songs may have different kinds of patterns but they still fit perfectly in the elevated nature of the album.
‘Bloody Mary’ is sort of an experiment by the band as they decide to go a bit slow on this one. It starts with an amazing tapped bass line and transcends into a crazy section with old school death metal riffs which continues until the verse starts. The chorus of the song is low-tempo paced and is pretty catchy. The track exhibits a lot of maturity and is my favourite off the album. A commendable thing about this album is all the songs have been crafted quite flawlessly; the song structures are so simple and the progressions have been stitched together with perfectly tailored bridges.
All in all, the EP is a brilliant effort by the band, especially with them being so young and with an ace production quality, it is pretty listenable. We look forward to more terrific material from the band.
Frayex are:
Arjun – vocals, rhythm guitars
Shashank – bass, vocals
Madhav – lead guitars
Ashish – drums
