Review Summary: The most colorful and heaviest Red Fang album so far, but not an immediate success.
Portland's beer-crushing, zombie-killing, air-guitar-contest-judging, and now katana-wielding heroes are back after a five years long hiatus. They’re famous for their crazy music videos (don’t say you haven’t seen any!) and for their pure fun stoner metal jams. However, in
Arrows they “recrafted” their sound quite drastically: Red Fang now sounds heavier than ever, but it isn’t an entirely successful experiment. Of course, there is nothing bad about a band wanting to progress or exploring different territories, but
Arrows feels something like the evolution of what they’ve hinted at during their
Only Ghosts effort, but somehow this new direction feels problematic, rather than great.
I’ve always loved Red Fang for their easily flowing, jauntly fun albums, and I really enjoyed when they smuggled some really heavy songs into their albums too (see “Dirt Wizard” from
Murder The Mountains for example). The combination of the light, beer-fueled stoner rock and the almost sludge metal-alike heaviness made most of their albums interesting and super fun. Even at their worst, albums like
Whales and Leeches, had at least a few awesome songs. Many things have changed in
Arrows. First of all, the production went through a dramatic remodel: an odd, gritty and particularly lifeless production replaced the clean sounding of their previous works. It feels like listening to a badly mastered album from a quite weary vinyl… everything sounds compressed, and the volume of the vocals and the drums fluctuate in each song. Very annoying, especially if we compare the studio work just with the previous album, which had a perfectly balanced and tight mixing. The only positive thing about the change was the beneficial effect on the bass sound, which sounded amazing through the whole album.
On the other hand, the overall mood has gone through changes as well. As I mentioned in the summary, this the heaviest Red Fang album to date, which is strongly rooted by the addition of a significant amount of dissonant chords and tempo changes (especially important in “Unreal Estate” and “Days Collide”). Moreover they added a few very unexpected drone/noise interludes like the album’s opener “Take It Back”, or the even weirder guitar-raping feedback-storm “Interop-Mod”, which is very tiring. Also, they showed their love for pure punk in this album, in “My Disaster” and “Rabbits in Hives”. Altogether, experimenting with these new elements isn’t a bad thing, however in
Arrows they feel very out of place, since they are somewhat incompatible with their own style.
There are two sides of the same coin though:
Arrows has some great moments as well. Same case with
Whales and Leeches, the album’s better songs are the singles. Both the title-track and “Funeral Coach” are great songs, which clearly outshine pretty much everything else from the album, but the biggest moment in the album is “Why”. The song starts with a really moody riff, soonly followed by acoustic melodies and Aaron Beam’s singing, and later on the song explodes as things get heavier. The result is quite similar to how a Mastodon song would sound, which is a great achievement and a very welcomed surprise.
In the end, I have to sadly conclude that
Arrows is a rather disappointing album, containing only two or three noteworthy songs. They induced many new elements into their sound-palette, but the way they did so resulted in a failed experiment: a motley, overwrought and boring record.
