But despite their professed reliance on linearity, Red Fang are anything but simplistic. The band formed in 2005 when Beam, drummer John Sherman and guitarist David Sullivan found themselves in an individual and collective musical void. Sherman, Beam (at that time playing guitar) and Sullivan started jamming in Sherman’s basement in Portland, Oregon, gradually working out a bunch of instrumental tracks. When rhythm guitarist Bryan Giles returned from San Diego with a collection of his own fledgling tracks, Red Fang was born – almost. “We had a problem,” Beam says. “We were getting ready to play our first show and we had three guitarists and no bass player. We each took a turn as bassist, and it became clear pretty quickly that I was not going to be playing guitar in this band anymore.”
After playing a show under the name Panda on December 31, 2005, the band soon changed their name to Red Fang (which, according to some Star Wars nerds, is a lesser-known bounty hunter). In 2009, Red Fang released their debut record, Red Fang. “That record absolutely captured exactly what we were all about at the time,” Beam says.
The recording of the album was split between the living room of Sullivan’s house and a studio that wasn’t much different to Sullivan’s living room. “At that point I would say none of us had really yet devoted much mental energy to the studio process,” Beam says. “Going into the studio at that point was always more about making a historical document of songs we had spent time perfecting live, and was not as much of an independent creative process.”
Red Fang have gone on to release another two albums, Murder the Mountains in 2011 and Whales and Leeches in 2013. Chris Funk – multi-instrumentalist for The Decemberists and producer of records by alt-country artist Langhorne Slim and folk-rock outfit The Builders and the Butchers – produced both albums. “If Whales and Leeches was a ship, then Chris was the navigator,” Beam says. “He made sure we stayed the course and didn’t veer too far into dangerous waters.”
While it’s Red Fang’s brutal stoner metal riffs that hit you first, within the band’s lyrics can be found evocative images and challenging psychological themes. “I think it is safe to say that in 100 per cent of cases we begin writing a song based on a riff,” Beam says. “I’d say probably half the songs we have recorded from Murder the Mountains forward, we have had little to no lyrics or melody written before we go into the studio to do them. Bryan has been known to completely ad-lib during a vocal take and not even need to redo.”
Nonetheless, a sense of darkness and foreboding can be glimpsed in songs such as Voices of the Dead, Behind the Light and No Hope. Though, Beam says the band’s gaze isn’t that deep. “Voices of the Dead is specifically about my fear of failure to write a decent record amidst all the pressure I was feeling to make a follow up to Murder the Mountains. It’s about the death of Red Fang, really. Behind the Light is similarly themed, although it’s a bit more optimistic, actually. It presents the idea of walking behind the light rather than into the light as a way of denying death, I suppose. No Hope was a song Bryan wrote and I think it’s about how hard it was for him to get the high score on the Doctor Who pinball machine. Or maybe it was about how much he loves kittens,” Beam laughs.
As residents of Portland, the members of Red Fang are very familiar with the characters and scenarios played out by Fred Armisen (who features in the video to Blood Like Cream) and Carrie Brownstein in Portlandia. “The reason Portlandia is so successful is because it effectively lampoons a segment of the population that had previously been sort of left off the hook,” Beam says. “It’s called Portlandia because a disproportionately large percentage of the population of Portland is like those characters. And that is part of what makes Portland so desirable and comfortable to live for some people, and part of what makes it attractive to me, so naturally I identify with some of those characters. There is a dark side to all this, but that would be a whole separate interview.”
Right now, Red Fang are preparing for their second trip to Australia, after playing Soundwave in 2013. In the future, well, that’s another story. “I think the future holds for Red Fang the same thing it holds for everyone else,” Beam says. “We will all turn into grey-skinned hermaphrodites with our brains directly attached to the Internet. We will become a single being with many bodies.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
