Red Fang

American sledgehammer stoner metal giants RED FANG are returning to Australia this May taking in all capital cities. RED FANG, in its own nutty fashion, turn distortion rock into an imperious form of Rock Theatre, at times with its tongue rammed as far as its cheek muscles will contain it. Joining the tour, will be local rockers DRUNK MUMS and you’d be hard pressed to find someone that’s into rock and roll that doesn’t get lost in one of their live shows. Hi Fi Way: The Pop Chronicles spoke to Aaron Beam (bass/ vocals) about the tour and their plans for new music.

Great news that Red Fang are heading back for an Australian tour?
Yes! It’s great to be coming back again, looking forward to it a lot. We’ve been on tour with Corrosion Of Conformity, Black Label Society and recently with Mastodon. Things have been going really well.

What have been the highlights so far?
Those Mastodon tours are always fun, a really fun camp to hang out with, such really nice people and the shows are good for us because their fans are in the same vain and the same type of music. At the end of 2016 some of those shows were the best of that tour we were headlining.

Is it always a bit of a tough thing trying to win over someone else’s crowd?
For sure, it’s a challenge, a fun challenge and we have faith in what we are doing. We know that the way we constructed our set list that if people aren’t really paying attention at the beginning by the end people who are paying attention we trick them in to liking us! On this Black Label tour there were a couple of times, we have been doing this a long time I just think it is funny when people aren’t feeling it, people were clearly bored of us, even one guy who had his back turned for our whole set.

Some people clearly cease to amaze
Yeah, for sure!

Is the Australian tour mostly focused on the relatively new album Only Ghosts or are you going back over all four albums?
We’ll be definitely playing songs from all our albums, mixing it up but also playing a handful of new songs from the new record which we’re really excited about playing live. There will also be the crowd favourites which are also our favourites.

Drunk Mums are an awesome choice for a support band, did you have a hand in picking them?
For every tour the support band we review all the options especially when it is going to be one main support for the whole entire tour. We had a look at a whole bunch of videos and I’m super excited about Drunk Mums and can’t wait to see what they’re like live.

Have you been happy with how Only Ghosts has been received?
We are always surprised when people are in to what we are doing. That record was slightly different from the other ones, we changed producers and we approached it slightly different in the way that we recorded it as we were thinking about the songs as we were recording. It feels a lot more serious and a different style of record to me. It feels like a lot of the songs that have been incorporated in to the set are going really well, so we’re really happy with it.

Have there been many ideas floating around for the next album or is it still a bit too early to be even contemplating it?
We don’t have a plan for when or where but we have lots of pieces of songs which are starting to come together. I think these songs will be a little bit longer and with the breaks between recordings we have a backlog of ideas in our brains that are falling out left and right. It’s a matter of sitting down and going to work crafting them in to songs.

Do you think sonically it will be a change in sound?
It feels like at this point but we never really know until we are done with everything. Right now it feels like the songs are slightly more technical, if that is even possible for us, they’re a little bit nastier and less moody.

Sounds great, as long you keep coming up with awesome videos.
Yeah, we love doing videos.

How much does what platform or how the album will be released comes in to the thought process?
We haven’t started talking about that but our manager and label have already started having those discussions along those lines. There was a really big change between Whales And Leeches and Only Ghosts, album sales across the board dropped a lot for everybody, we try and focus on writing music that feels true to ourselves. There was talk some time ago about doing more collectible stuff and limited release collectibles for people who wanted super cool artefacts.

Are there any cool covers on this tours such as Elvis’s Only Fools Rush In which you have been doing on tour?
Yeah, we did that for a Portland compilation series called Fools Rush In with the proceeds benefiting the Portland Timbers Community. We were one of four bands that covered that song for the release, none of us are really fans of Elvis music so much but the lyrics in that song are pretty awesome and we already had the music together. Our engineer suggested I go in and just start singing over the instrumental track and see what happens. Sometimes the spur of the moment shit is the best shit.

Interview by Rob Lyon

Catch Red Fang and Drunk Mums on the following dates
https://tickets.destroyalllines.com/Default.aspx