(Credit: Anna Westbury)
“I’m not going to lie,” feather-voiced singer Cayla Fralick says. “I love being the girl in the band.”
Fralick is sitting in a white fluffy chair and talking about Kemp Ridley, the promising Columbia rock quintet she fronts. The group includes guitarists Thomas Barrineau and Trey Lewis, bassist Cam Powell and drummer Turner Schull.
“They respect me for what I do,” Fralick, 21, says, “but at the same time they won’t hold back from teasing me or telling me to go make them a sandwich or something.”
The chick-singer-in-a-band-of-dudes configuration calls to mind groups like Jefferson Airplane or Paramore. Kemp Riley sounds nothing like those artists. Instead of jaded psychedelia or glossy, loud pop, Kemp pulls from singer/songwriters, classic rock and modern jam-bands.
Since Fralick is good-looking, you can’t help from wondering about “Behind the Music”-type romantic subplots. Asked the key to keeping things cool, she says, “We started out as friends first.”
Rising University of South Carolina seniors, Kemp Ridley’s seeds were sown their freshman year when Fralick met Powell while skateboarding downtown.
Kemp released a self-titled debut in June 2010. The five-track EP includes “Escape Artist,” which floats off a slide-guitar intro, and “Paper Graves,” a tune Fralick wrote about her struggles to get words onto a page and the band lit with prog-metal pow.
Kemp planned to re-enter the studio this summer to cut another EP, but the funds just aren’t there. “We considered doing one of those Kickstarter campaigns,” Fralick, a theatre major, says, “but we didn’t want to be a nuisance to people. ‘Hey, give us your money.’” Instead, they plan to record material, including the Brian May-channeling “Honey Honey,” themselves.
“We need to get new music out because right now what people hear is what we had when we first started. We’ve really developed over the last year and have more of a sound now.”
