Team Fright isn’t exactly a collective, but Team Fright: A Primer is a potent introduction to the Lakewood-based crew of overlapping, active and defunct garage-rock projects sharing the common denominator of one Wred Fright. An indie-rock Harvey Pekar in a Mexican wrestler’s mask, Fright writes fiction and comic books when he isn’t playing guitar, bass, drums, accordion, and theremin in rough-around-the-edges bands that include Yeast?, the GoGoBots, and the Joslyns.
Primer starts off with Fright’s most polished work, “The Queen of Zine,” a plugged-in solo ode to a self-publisher who’s mesmerizing in her sheer independence. “Freedom of speech is for everyone/Doing a ‘zine is so much fun/When I hold it in my hands, I love what I’ve done/Even if all the photocopies weigh a ton,” he sings, pushing the envelope of in-key intonation. The other four tracks — one from each of the aforementioned bands — are boom-box-quality recordings of pop variations from psychedelic to punk-bent. It’s not pretty, but it works. Let’s hope that he’s saving up for some studio time.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2004.