If you spend just 10 minutes listening to the music of the whacked-out, Los Angeles-based psych-punk rockers Frankie and the Witch Fingers, you’ll undoubtedly think, “How on earth does that guitarist come up with so many crazy-cool riffs?”
Turns out, the group’s lead guitarist, Josh Menashe, has a formula for that, and it doesn’t involve his instrument. “I used to come up with riffs the normal way, which meant I’d sit and play and my fingers would go to all the usual places,” he says. “But now I just sort of walk around and think of riffs, and then I try to play them. It’s really helped me break out of a cage.”
The band’s eighth and newest release, Trash Classic, sounds like exactly that; It’s an overwhelming mash of surf music, garage rock, late-Seventies new wave and punky heavy-metal crunch jam-packed into 11 tight tunes so relentlessly energetic, they could qualify as a cardio workout.
“A lot of people say we’re their favorite running music,” Menashe says. “We’ve never been big on ballads or extremely long songs. We like to get in and get out, then go on to the next idea. There’s no reason to belabor the point because once you’ve said it, it’s done.”
On rapid-fire knockouts like Fucksake, Economy and Eggs Laid Brain, Menashe locks in with jagged synth lines in a way that recalls early Gary Numan, B-52’s and Devo.
“We started collecting all these old synthesizers, and we pretty much decided on this record to let the synths take the lead,” he says. “Somehow, that didn’t happen as much as we liked. The guitars still came out sounding pretty awesome.”
“Awesome” describes the furious dance-punk rocker Dead Silence, on which Menashe lays into a herky-jerk riff that calls to mind another new wave giant – the Knack. “I can hear that reference,” he says. “There’s a little bit of My Sharona going on, and maybe something else, but I couldn’t name which one. I think I’ve got one of the Knack’s albums; I found it in a dollar bin somewhere. I’ll have to give it a listen.”
- Trash Classic is out now via RAS/Greenway
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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