Friends - Manifest!
- Written by Russell Warfield
2010 single 'I'm Your Girl' sounded exactly as breezily-cool and nonchalant as you would expect of a track from a Brooklyn band with such a resolutely un-googleable name as Friends. Rolling off a loose funk groove, all live drums and unhurried bass, lead singer Samantha Urbani (even her name is trendy as fuck) sounding sassy as hell, warning other chicks off her man in an entirely non-jealous, non-confrontational way. 'Friend Crush' mined similar territories: an unabashedly confident and slinky pop number, driven by drums with scattered synth responses and bass runs, and a natty little chorus. These tracks drew strength from their self-assured delivery – of course – but primarily from the modesty of their sparse grooves; approaching their textures with a successfully less-is-more approach to the instrumentation.
And while these two singles still distinguish themselves as the best cuts off debut album Manifest!, the other clutch of stand out highlights adhere to similar principles. 'Home' drives forward on little more than clattering rhythms and single-note throbs of bass guitar, leaving all the space in the world for Urbani's hooks to glimmer across the groove, showcasing her sultry and commanding delivery of 2K12 girl power. Similarly, follow up track 'A Thing Like This' grinds through thin-but-robust drum work, panpipe emulating synths and spongy bass lines – again allowing Urbani's killer pop instinct and seductive vocal to take centre stage.
Friends are a resolutely human outfit – no matter how tight or dance-worthy they make their grooves, the drums and bass lines always sound endearingly human and responsive; always being easy to picture them actually playing the synths rather than programming them; always, in short, sounding like a band. At their best, Friends embrace this quality and play it to their advantage. Where the album comes apart, however, is where they either try mask this, or overreach the capabilities of their organic arrangements and faintly lo-fi sensibilities. The coda of 'Home', for instance, yearns for the extra euphoria of a shimmering, hi-fi production budget to kick it into the gear it thinks it's in. Meanwhile, 'A Light' and 'Ideas on Ghosts' sport two of the albums most unremarkable vocal lines and, rather than sharpening the hooks, the band instead double down on the textures – a fix-it scheme which has the unfortunate effect of overburdening the mix, further sabotaging the tracks rather than improving them.
The band's shining rebuttal to these criticisms is closing track 'Mind Control' – a lightning funk-guitar beacon of snappy rhythms and stacked textures which proves that Friends can pull off the Prince approach when they still retain a central focus on razor hooks and sharp structure. Moving from Urbani's falsetto to zany, shout-along gang vocals reminiscent of funk greats like Parliament, Friends close on a tantalising taste of the band they might grow to be, but fail to fully evolve into on their debut Manifest!. What we're presented with is a record which – for all its highlights and merits – is ultimately incredibly formative, testing directions to frequently pleasant and winsome ends, but without arriving at what feels like an established identity, and certainly not Friends' full potential.