Rise - The Answer

 

Provenance: The Answer, hailing from Northern Ireland, were one of those bands hyped by Classic Rock back in the day. If memory serves, they won the magazine's best new band award back in 2003-ish (NB: I've checked now, it was 2005), their bluesy rock influenced by acts like Free, Led Zeppelin and the like.

This was also about the same time that Classic Rock was crusading for acts like Rose Hill Drive and Roadstar, both of whom I've seen live. I feel it was a time and place where rock music was seen as somewhat moribund, lost in the dregs of nu-metal, neo-grunge and the flowering of chirpy indie that all occurred when I was at university. It is understandable that CR went to bat for the new generation, but I only recall with any clarity two bands from that era whose live act left an impression on me - Airbourne and the Answer.

I actually got to see the Answer at the height of that initial buzz, probably right around the time that Rise was being released. They played a club in Exeter called the Cavern (where I also saw Wednesday 13 and My Ruin, among others), and it was wild. Never before had the demographic skewed so much older, but neither had it ever been quite so rammed. And the Answer? Yeah, great. Star of the show was singer Cormac Neeson; experiencing that much lungpower in close proximity was quite something.

Review: I must confess, I haven't listened to Rise much over the years. Half the point of this blog was that I actually delve through my CD collection anew, and indeed, I really did anticipate a quality of 'newness' to the music purely due to my neglect. And is there? Yes and no. On one level, yeah, I don't recall much of Rise save for lead track 'Under the Sky' and 'Memphis Water'. On another level, it's entirely familiar because the music on Rise cleaves so tightly to all the tropes and cliches of that most conservative of genres, rock music. 

The cynic in me wonders whether the Answer boys set out, a la Def Leppard or the Cult, to make an album that plays well in big live arenas. The tempos are played straight, the riffs are big and meaty, and we never really stray far from the minor pentatonic scale. At all. Consequently every move feels awfully telegraphed, even if the execution is all of a relatively high standard. This is a problem. Go back and listen to first-run 'classic' rock bands and you'll hear a surprising amount of variety; an easy example to highlight would be ZZ Top, twisting Texas boogie-rock into something weird and wonderful, but even the unfairly-maligned Lynyrd Skynyrd have albums full of unexpected touches. These elements, when stacked alongside more straightforward adherences, are what give those bands and their music spice and interest.

Unfortunately, the Answer, at least on Rise, seem to think the juice is found in the other appurtenances of hard rock - volume, bluster, power chords and guitar solos. All of these things are cool, damn cool, but if you build a band solely from these breezeblocks you get Bad Company. Even then, Paul Rodgers might wander off and write a song about a fucking seagull, which would be a blessed relief on Rise. I'm not asking for Captain Beefheart, but the lyrics are some of the limpest I've yet encountered when reviewing albums. Calling them 'cookie cutter' does them a disservice, because cookies are enjoyable - here, we have the most watery, milquetoast sops to songcraft imaginable. I don't even know what half of these songs mean - 'Come Follow Me', eh? Where to? Jonestown?

Which brings me on to 'Memphis Water' - recall that I remembered this song? It wasn't for very good reasons. Quelle surprise, it starts off as a blues shuffle, because of course a song called 'Memphis Water' would. However, my biggest beef is that this lump-de-dump nonsense earned its title much in the same way that Kentucky Fried Chicken's Kansas BBQ Bites earned theirs. In both cases it's a vague groping towards authenticity; KC does indeed have a reputation where good BBQ can be had, and Memphis is steeped in the blues. However, there's a huge difference between experiencing Cowtown BBQ in person versus a side-order to your Zinger Tower Meal from Newhaven KFC, and likewise, the desultory word-associative babble of 'Memphis Water' resembles B.B. King as much as I resemble Bebe Neuwirth.  (NB: I've been to Kansas City, Memphis and Newhaven, but that's neither here nor there.)

Oh, and this is mid-2000s hard rock, so the loudness levels are pushed way past their peaks, which hardly evokes the likes of Sleepy John Estes. Metallica's Death Magnetic and Rush's Vapor Trails are both bigger culprits where clipping is concerned, but this bad boy is a pretty painful listen at times too.

What a shame. I feel that the Answer are a good, serviceable band let down by material that isn't so much poor as it is too, too safe. It's focus-grouped hard rock, and in the live environment that is sometimes fine, advantageous even. Hell, in the intro I hinted that the Answer are a good time in the flesh, and perhaps that's sufficient. Alas, the overall effect of Rise is like being bludgeoned over the head by your most boring relative. I probably won't listen to this again in a hurry.

Fang Bang - Wednesday 13

 

Provenance: My time at the University of Exeter was largely pleasant, but being out in Devon meant for slim pickings on the rock front most of the time. The one oasis was the Cavern, a vaulted cellar in the centre of town where I saw acts like The Answer, My Ruin and today's subject, Wednesday 13.

In fact, I think I picked this album up after seeing the erstwhile Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13 and Murderdolls frontman (not to mention his stint as a Faster Pussycat tour guitarist!). Wednesday 13 wasn't really my cup of mud, but when you're drowning in a sea of Newton Faulkner and Mr Scruff, you seize anything resembling a life raft.

Later, this would also extend to frequent trips to a Monday night goth night run by a living skeleton named Francis...but I'll save the story for when I review Judas Priest's Turbo.

In any case, Wednesday 13 put on a raucous live show, and I spent the night quaffing cheap beer with good friends, so all in all a massive success. I bought this more as a keepsake from a cracking night out, rather than an album I knew I'd get a lot of replay value out of. Years have gone by since that gig and I haven't spun Fang Bang (great name) very much at all, so it's due a reappraisal.

Review: If the name Fang Bang wasn't enough of a giveaway. song titles such as 'Morgue Than Words', 'My Home Sweet Homicide' and 'Happily Ever Cadaver' should give you a clue that this release is kindred spirits with Rob Zombie and mid-era Alice Cooper; good, wholesome, comic-book and MGM monster movie fun. However, unlike the industrial-powered ramalama of Zombie or the spray-glam of Cooper, Fang Bang is anthemic pop-punk with a sleazy edge.

And so I ask you, faithful reader, have you oft seen me extolling the virtues of pop-punk on these pages? No, you haven't. The closest I've come would be my encomium to Sloppy Seconds and their mighty Destroyed album, with which it shares some of its ghoulish sci-fi sensibility. That said, Destroyed works as a clever-stupid, ramshackle, knockabout celebration of all life's most egregious sins, and remains very much an outlier in my collection. 

Fang Bang simply isn't as cute, clever or as charming as Destroyed (but what is?); but I'm surprising myself with how easy it's going down. Songs all blend into one, and as catchy as they can be - especially at the choruses - they're all just one hook short of being proper earworms. One feels that if Cheap Trick or the Wildhearts got to grips with these tracks they'd wind up with just the right amount of acid and saccharine. Still, 'Faith In The Devil' has got a nasty bite, and you'd have to be a fucking sadsack not to smile at the 'oi oi oi' section in 'Happily Ever Cadaver'. 

I don't really know what else to say - everything rushes along at a nice clip, as it should, and production bears all the hallmarks of the early 2000s, which has never been my favourite era for capturing noises. One plus is that Wednesday's raspy sneer fits in with the loud 'n' compressed flavour of the age - of all the other singers I'm familiar with, he most resembles his former employer in Faster Pussycat, Taime Downe. It lends a suitably cloacal aspect to mascara-and-glitter smeared proceedings, although it has to be said that his range stretches about as far as Russell Grant attempting to dunk a basketball.

But, look, if you can't raise a smirk to a song called 'Buried With Children' (which is really good, in fairness) and the lyric 'I've got blood in my alcohol system' doesn't make the corners of your mouth twitch, I can't help you. This is rambunctious Hot Topic splatter-punk with no little heart and a smudge of dark glamour besides. Fang Bang may not quite blast the rafters on a sedate Sunday afternoon, but crank this in a poorly-ventilated sweatbox with £2 Carlsbergs on offer and you've got the recipe for a helluva good, gruesome time.

In League With Satan - Venom

Provenance: A guy at university wouldn't shut up about how important Venom were, so I caved and bought this two disc compilation to see what the fuss is all about.

Review: I guess that listening to In League With Satan brought home to me that importance is a slippery old concept to get a handle on. Venom are, arguably, very important to the development of heavy metal. Musically they influenced the nascent thrash scene, but on a more wholesale level could be said to have birthed black metal. Venom synthesised a host of their own influences - punk, heavy metal, Satanism, Amicus horror movies - into the fundaments of black metal, aesthetically, stylistically and thematically.

Venom were also, on the basis of this compilation, spectacularly awful.

It begs the question - just because an artist heralds a new movement within a genre, do we still need to listen to them? This, after all, was my imperative to check out Venom in the first place. I have no real l33t or kvlt credentials to my name (if we exclude In League With Satan I own perhaps three black metal albums) so maybe I am entirely the wrong person to attempt to peer through the auditory fog to try and identify what the chin-strokers see in tracks such as 'One Thousand Days in Sodom', 'The Seven Gates of Hell' and, perhaps the best title in metal history, 'Aaaaarghhh'; but to those who do tread along the Shining Path set out by the Lord of Lies, surely this also sounds like dogshit?

Yet there are people out there who love Venom. I recall waiting in line to see My Ruin at the Cavern in Exeter (what memories!) and falling into conversation with a chap in the queue. What started off as a fairly genial chat about rollercoasters descended to the point where he threw a punch at me (which I dodged, utilising a 'Drunken Master' defence style (NB: I was drunk)) because I made fun of Venom. More specifically, I made fun of the shrine to Venom he had set up in his flat, but the point remains - I may see Venom as heavy metal clowns, but my erstwhile opponent saw them as important enough to, perhaps, offer sacrifices in their name.

Despite my personal opinion that In League With Satan is a buffoonish parade of the ripest incompetence, I'll at least try to pay dues where earned. Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin flirted with Satanism, but Venom really go all out - they are the bogeymen that housewives clutching their pearls to Kiss worried about. That in itself is quite fun, though if I were Old Nick, and this was the music I was allotted in the late twentieth century, I would go back to tuning guitars at the crossroads. The music itself does push towards what were the extremes of speed and volume at the time, but without the whipcrack discipline of Motorhead it often descends into a churning heavy metal gazpacho, which has its own strange charm. Bassist and "singer" Cronos is either a bonehead or the most mordant wit in the game; either way, his dumbass lyrics, when discernible, are entertaining enough.

I don't really know what else to say. There's a link between the production values on the material from first album Welcome To Hell (music journalist Geoff Barton memorably said it possessed the "hi-fi dynamics of a fifty year-old pizza", but went on to give it five stars) and the lo-fi approach cultivated by many subsequent black metallers, for sure. It's as if studio polish and distinct separation of instruments are part of the realm of fakery, representing yet another branch of metal's oddly explicit obsession with authenticity (think Manowar's 'All Men Play On Ten' and 'Death To False Metal', or the graphics in Nitro's O.F.R. release that suggested that not only were keyboards not used but moreover were entirely banned from the recording process altogether). Abhorrence towards sounding good seems rather precious and faintly ridiculous (to this Steely Dan fan, hyuk hyuk), but here again, I am almost definitely missing the point. You want to sound ugly, brutal and antisocial.

But do you want to to sound stupid?

Nonetheless, In League With Satan represents a triumph, of sorts. Venom found a sound and a look that stood out; they found a sympathetic label in Neat Records, also from the north-east of England, who championed their local scene, putting out landmark releases by bands such as Raven, Jaguar and Blitzkrieg. They rode that horse all the way home, smoke-bombing stages around the world to the strains of 'Genocide', 'Satanarchist', and 'Blood Lust', and gave a lot of angry Norwegian kids a blueprint for their own creative efforts. Not all bad, then...?