It’s lucky there was nobody around, really.
So here’s the scene: I’m in a semi-public place and groaning noisily for no apparent reason. It’s not even that there’s something particularly terrible about
Fang Bang’s opening track, ‘Morgue than Words.’ At least if it was
terrible it’d be interesting. the problem is that it’s just flat-out boring.
I’ll admit my expectations to begin with were muted. I’m a casual fan of Wednesday’s, I prefer Murderdolls to the Drag Queens but neither band has an album I’d regard as consistently good.
Transylvania 90210, on the other hand, had stronger songs but suffered from trying to be too much at once and never really worked as a coherent album. Wednesday himself appears to have acknowledged this shortcoming in his writing with his second album; he’d originally written a number of metal-based tracks before scrapping them in favour of the mix of glam rock and horror punk that makes up
Fang Bang.
Still, I expected something a little more
gratifying to begin the album. Opening tracks have a function entirely different from the rest of the album; their purpose is of an announcement or statement of intent, something to whet the listener’s anticipation with a teaser of what’s to come. In hard rock terms, this means it’s supposed to be
exciting. Nominally, ‘Morgue than Words’ succeeds at this: it combines Wednesday’s love of classic punk and horror-related wordplay; musically, he’s missed the boat completely.
Wednesday 13 will never be a great singer. His voice is compelling, sure, and he’s no mere Alice Cooper impersonator, he has more in his armoury than that. He’s proud of his trademark rasp, but in constricting his voice so he loses the ability to play with a melody, removing all and any subtlety from his vocal delivery. Essentially, he’s at the mercy of his material; without the necessary singing ability to make an ordinary tune interesting, he ends up recording duds like ‘Morgue Than Words,’ a weak attempt at a melodic punk track * la Graves-era Misfits which falls flat because he lacks the vocal versatility to save a two-note chorus from outright monotony. Repeating it twenty times certainly doesn’t make it any more endearing.
But what really gets me is that he should know this! I don’t mind an artist attempting to punch above his weight every now and then, but it seems like he’s not even aware of this massive limitation, or else he doesn’t care. He repeats the formula on ‘Faith in the Devil,’ which is thankfully more interesting musically (probably because it lifts the melody from Dream Evil’s ‘Book of Heavy Metal’), but the results are equally frustrating. There’s a clear solution to the problem too: Wednesday doubles his raspy vocal with a sung track on ‘Happily Ever Cadaver’ and ‘Home Sweet Homicide.’ The dual-effect of the vocals and the strong melodies behind them place the two tracks among the highlights not just of the disc but of Wednesday’s recording career to date. If he could put a little more imagination into every track, he’d have a far more solid output.
The instruments are as straight-forward as the vocals. Wednesday plays all guitars himself, pretty impressively as it turns out. ‘Faith In The Devil’ and ‘Buried With Children’ are loud, aggressive sleazy metal tracks (Wednesday played guitar for a number of early ‘90s glam bands before he sold his soul for a comic book), while ‘Curse of Me’ and ‘Die Sci-Fi’ are pure B-movie with layers of echo-y guitar lines that are as much Hank Marvin as often as they are Psychobilly. The bulk of the tracks are pure, chunky punk, however, again reminiscent of the latter-era Misfits. As is also the case with the vocals, Wednesday’s best guitar performances come when he’s at his most aggressive, but conversely (perversely?) the finest guitar moments come on the eerie atmospheric ‘Curse of Me.’
Setting aside my earlier criticism, Wednesday’s best vocal on the album is a real hair-raiser: ‘Too Much Blood’ recalls
Subhuman Race-era Sebastian Bach both instrumentally and vocally. On the more aggressive tracks such as this he sounds genuinely edgy, a fact which makes me wonder why there aren’t more of them. The tagline “too much blood in my alcohol system” is a tad cringe-worthy, but the lyrics are generally quite witty. Wednesday sings some of these a little too convincingly too. He delivers lines like “you had such beautiful eyes/It’s hard to tell now they’re covered in flies” so sincerely that it took me longer than I’d care to admit to realise it wasn’t a particularly reasonable thing to say.
It’s one of the more refreshing aspects of the Wednesday 13 experience that he genuinely revels in the world of horror he helps creates. Whereas it wouldn’t be too much of a shock to see the next My Chemical Romance emblazoned with a sticker declaring “This is so ironic!!,” Wednesday approaches his material with a reverence that allows him to sing a song named ‘Til Death Do Us Party’ and still come across as intelligent. Utterly camp, but intelligent, and he’s damn good at what he does. So even if
Fang Bang fails as often as it works, I’d never rule out a great Wednesday 13 (or Murderdolls, or Frankstein Drag Queens) CD some day.
Besides, he can’t do any worse than
Killer.
