Fang
Landshark!

So many memories in this site. A part of my life. This morning I felt nostalgic.

And here I am with my first review after years.

I had left off at the American hardcore of the 80s and that's where I start again.

In that music, in my opinion, there was all the "sense" of existence, all the evil of History contained in a desperate cry, drowned in a storm of noisy guitars, churned at a dizzying pace. Many bands knew how to convert that cosmic pain into positive energy (Minor Threat, Descendents), while others could do nothing but acknowledge, at most with a bit of sad irony, the inevitability of a state of affairs that has always seen (and always will see) Man self-destruct. There are no values, only disvalues masked. There is no sense in the things we do, both in grand schemes and in everyday life, because everything leads to death, everything reduces to nothing.

If you're happy, optimistic, if things are going well for you at this moment in your life, and you feel the need to get depressed, or rather to touch the void that surrounds you and of which you are an integral part, don't miss the opportunity to listen to "Landshark" (1982) by the Californians Fang.

Anyone familiar with the Flipper, fellow citizens of the Fang in the degenerate San Francisco of the early 80s, will already have an idea of our folks' "musical proposal": nighttime setting, possibly winter, the outskirts of any city, a foul-smelling alley, rubbish everywhere (especially human), alcohol, heroin, brawls, stabbings, or perhaps a garage, a parking lot, a motel room, solitude and indifference above all else. The difference is that while the Flipper let everything slide off them wearing a frayed weave of guitars and decaying basses, the Fang, even more cynically, packaged the grime in easy little songs complete with riff-verse-chorus, coalescing the uncontrolled leaks of the Flipper into "textbook" cacophonies, so radically ugly that they are catchy, thus founding the famous "grunge". Everything in "Landshark", from the putrid guitar to the muddled rhythms, from the essentiality of the compositions to the singing as disturbed as it is passive, seems to have come out of Nirvana’s first album. If it weren't for Cobain, behind that apathetic mood that transpired from the character, the lyrics, the voice, preserved traces of that mysterious entity called "soul" and thus, in his calvary, there was room for the sighs of "About a Girl" or the anguish of "School". None of this in Fang: only matter, only reified substance, no feelings except that of its absence.

Even if, with these premises, one would come to think that in this album one song "is worth" the other (and so it is, in fact), precisely because music (Art) "is worth" even when it expresses a disvalue, every song in "Landshark" deserves an analysis.

The fundamental tracks are "Law and Order", for how it drags dull riffs like beads reluctantly recited, while the voice does nothing but flounder, suffocated, and "Diary of a mad werrwoulf", instead shredded by a haunted, cannibalistic, vampiric singing, thirsty for nihilism, occasionally howling: curious how this track ends in a fade-out, as if it were a pop song... The old-school hardcore, the concise and frenetic one from the beginning of the decade, survives formally, but is rendered impotent, as if to pogo were puppets, and offers a few moments of fibrillation only in the apnea of "Drunk & Crazy". Not that the Fang didn’t at least pretend to seek a way out of these quicksands: in "The Money Will Roll Right In", a stoner serenade where they declare their "love" for young star Brooke Shields, they launch into grotesque attempts at solos, but they do not last more than half a turn of the riff; in "An Invitation" they even engage in an insane melodic progression, reaching a hand to the first-album Stooges and the other to the first Mudhoney; also with "Skinheads Smoke Dope" they try to lift their heads to find a light at the end of the tunnel, but to no avail. Also because there is no tunnel, no forward path, but only stagnation, quagmire, immobility: the music of the Fang is destined to eternally wallow in a black hole that admits no escape.

Dear DeBaserians, I am pleased to have returned among you.