An offshoot of Godwin’s Law (it might have been his brother who said it) has it that any metal band, if analyzed thoroughly, will eventually be likened to early-’70s Black Sabbath. You know: that bombastic faux-evil that sounded legitimately terrifying 40 years ago.
An offshoot of Godwin’s Law (it might have been his brother who said it) has it that any metal band, if analyzed thoroughly, will eventually be likened to early-’70s Black Sabbath. You know: that bombastic faux-evil that sounded legitimately terrifying 40 years ago.
Portland-based Red Fang is something like that: Faster than modern-day doom metal, perkier than your average stoner metal, less adventurous than psychedelic sludge and way too heavy for yesterday’s classic rock revival led by Wolfmother.
If you need any further clarification, five of the 10 tracks on their eponymous debut have something to do with animals in their titles, and six of them barely reach the three-minute mark. The riffs (yes, riffs) sound good, if that’s what you want to know.
It could be that I’m just a fan of the vintage sound in general. If there’s any problem with popular music today, it’s that it sounds too clean, too processed, too thoroughly perfected by way of the computer and drum tracks cribbed from Trent Reznor (for example, compare The Dethalbum I with The Dethalbum II, after Brendon Small had more money to blow).
I like to think I’m not the only one—the craving for the good old “roots” sound in every genre is one thing that stays constant in all music circles. We love to lionize the bands that come out of the woodwork to tear out the fat.
Metallica and Megadeth did it for metal in the ’80s, Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses did it for hard rock in the ’90s, as did the White Stripes at the dawn of the millennium.
Is Red Fang doing it for metal in the 2010s? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This band ain’t nearly that serious.
But that’s the beauty of the whole thing. Red Fang is the band that you head-bang to in between shots of Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and shot-gunned silver bullets. There’s an AC/DC, Pantera, even Motley Crue-esque ethos behind this kind of metal.
The ideas aren’t so big and lofty that the music gets up its own ass with platitudes like “meaning” and “dude, it’s all about the concept.” To hell with your concept. If I wanted concept, I’d listen to a flute solo on some ’80s prog-rocker with an album cover of a spaceship flying out of a turtle’s ass (see Asia’s maligned ’84 release, The Turtle Experience).
Red Fang is for those “Screw it, I’m listening to Poison” moods. You might be ashamed, but don’t be a tool and say it never happens to you (I’m looking at you, there, in the horn-rimmed glasses).
This is metal junk food—the kind you know does nothing for you, but dammit, you’ve got a hangover and you need something that goes down easy. You don’t want a pan-seared rib eye with red wine and shallot sauce; you want a damn Big Mac. You don’t have the patience for Mastodon or Toxic Holocaust; you want Red Fang, and you want it now for $1.99 with a coke.
Sounds like: The Obsessed, The Sword, Pentagram, High on Fire.
