If you are one of those people who revel in the modern trend for music that is polished and precise, autotuned and tinkered into its perfect form, which of course is anything but perfect, then we probably have different reasons for listening to music and certainly vastly different record collections. Give me music that is a bit raw and slightly ragged around the edges, underplayed and unpolished, which hasn’t been dehumanised, which you know would sound the same if you were experiencing it live in a small basement club as it does on record. Give me bands like Fringe Frontier.
“Heading For” is everything that rock and roll is based on. It’s about riff and energy, dynamics and swing, attitude and authenticity. Guitars crunch and collide, basslines blast out root-note rhythms, drums are unfussy… brilliantly so, and the vocals are delivered from the eye of this power-pop/garage-rock hurricane, sonic windblasted, battling for attention and wonderfully human! It’s what real music sounds like! Honest, upfront, and largely unadorned.
But that has always been the attraction of Fringe Frontier: the fact that they take all the great sounds of music history, from bluesy rock ‘n’ roll to propulsive power-pop, from low-slung garage rock to raucous indie, blend them, and create music that is fabulously fresh and fantastically familiar.
It’s what they do, and they do it brilliantly.
