It’s always a win or lose when you go to see a band live you have never heard before. I do that a lot when it’s free and relatively early, and actually I don’t have much to lose, just my time. But I always gamble my time for the chance to discover something new and interesting or even great.
So tonight a band called Fang Island, from Brooklyn, NY, was playing at Amoeba and I decided to check them out. They are definitely a guitar band (4 guys play guitar or bass, one plays drum), with an electro organ that is used on some songs. To describe their sound live I would say it is Sigur Ros meets Metallica, with the vocals coming only from Sigur Ros, I know it may seem a very strange combination, but that’s what I came up with. Their ethereal chant-vocals (they basically sing all together) are indeed unusual for rock music and remind some kind of ancient ethnic sound, may be Celtic, Bulgarian?
Fang Island does not make a large use of lyrics anyway, the songs are mostly instrumental, the lyrics being often reduced to mantra and the harmonies to ooooaoooo.
The sound that came from these guitars is extremely powerful, using an energy-ascending effect on many songs, and with that intensity, that vigor, that force, you see fireworks bursting in your head (I checked their CD and there are indeed some fireworks sound effects at the beginning of their first track), you see hordes of people running at the top of a mountain, you see ______ fill the blank with any kind of positive energy imagery you want, they all work. And the most surprising of all this, not a minute I got bored, which is sometimes the case when the songs all seem to melt into each other into a gigantesque rock jam. No, their songs are catchy, upbeat, furious at times and always epic. I don’t think I have lost my time.