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.

Hellbilly Deluxe - Rob Zombie

Provenance: This one was definitely bought for me by my parents, seeing as I would've been too spooked to have taken it off the shelves myself! Actually, it was a Christmas present.

Why Rob Zombie? Probably a combination of the cool White Zombie animation in Beavis and Butthead Do America and the fact that The Matrix (which featured a remix of 'Dragula' on the soundtrack) was literally the coolest film in the world when you're a boy in your early teens. I managed to download that Matrix remix via Napster, which probably took about four or five hours to do.

Before we get on to Hellbilly Deluxe, a word about The Matrix. I sure as shit didn't really understand it when I first encountered it back in 1999, but I thought those leather dusters looked sweet, an opinion that has since been validated in popular media. I recall that the film inspired a slew of doctoral theses, as it certainly tackled some rather chewy themes, but - good grief - it's dated badly. Looking back, it feels like Keanu Reeves got called up for any old cyberpunk caper. At one stage a character gets handed a MiniDisc. The kicker? A Joe Pantoliano starring role in a major motion picture (though I see he's on the slate for the next instalment of the Bad Boys franchise, which seems entirely apt). Anyway, long story short, a film that explored all kinds of stuff like postmodernism and nihilism became the lynchpin for a loose confederacy of women-hating internet racists whose emblem is a sad frog.

Review: Before getting into the meat of the review, may we please take a moment to admire this tweet?

I could genuinely stop now, as I don't think anybody will ever quite be as accurate and pithy as @MetalShayne was (he also posted a very good digest of Bruce Springsteen, sadly overlooked by most of Twitter). The Rob Zombie playbook for Hellbilly Deluxe is pretty much all there - pounding industro-metal, lyrics like a Tristan Tzara cut-up of Amicus and Universal monster movie scripts and his trademark elongated 'welllll' used almost like punctuation. The only aspect missing from the @MetalShayne pastiche are the sound clips ripped from B-movies that either introduce or feature within many of the tracks. Incidentally, these are fun when deployed sparingly, but Zomb slathers them on somewhat.

Sounds like a load of old pony, right? Well, that depends. Does the notion of Rammstein being produced by Quentin Tarantino appeal to you? Exactly, no, that also sounds terrible - so it's a pleasant surprise to plug this bad boy into my stereo and let it rip.

Firstly, despite my avowed preference for pre-1990s recording techniques, Hellbilly Deluxe is a big, chunky, scuzzy beast of a record. Production-wise, it actually sounds a little like Prodigy's Fat of the Land, albeit somewhat more maximalist. They're like two sides of the same coin - Fat of the Land was dance music acceptable to the heavy metal crowd, whilst Hellbilly Deluxe just switched that formula around. The Hot Rod Herman remix of 'Dragula' in The Matrix is a perfect illustration of how, with just a few bells and whistles, a Rob Zombie track could become a rocket-fuelled clubland shack-shaker.

Aside from the creeping tedium of hearing yet another track prefaced with a fuzzy movie snippet, I have only one real bugbear with Hellbilly Deluxe, which is that it becomes a little samey quite quickly. Zombie's distorted, growled vocals are appealing, and instantly recognisable, but tracks have to be built around his rather distinct delivery. Nonetheless, there are some real gems here, not least of all the mind-scrambling techno-grind of 'Living Dead Girl' and the pumping, vein-bursting intensity of 'What Lurks on Channel X?' Hellbilly Deluxe contains all the schlock and grue one would expect from a Vincent Price or Boris Karloff feature, conjured up into a wall of guitar, buzzing synthesisers and pounding electro beats.

Even at a rather lean 38 minutes the creepozoid interludes between tracks feel skipworthy, but I'd certainly whack Hellbilly Deluxe on shuffle down the gym, or perhaps if I just felt like scaring the kids living next door. Overall, the journey is one that is fun, loud, antisocial and a little bit daft - all things a good metal album should be.