Date: August 27, 2020
Venue: Tempo Bar, Brisbane
Acts: No Anchor, Fangs of a TV Evangelist
It’s my first encounter with Melbourne’s Fangs of a TV Evangelist. From the get-go, I like their ferocious racket — all spitting, crackling guitar and crunching percussion. I like the way all-out-effort is writ large across the shirtless bodies of drummer Jem and guitarist Jace — muscles strained and corded as they work to wring extra decibels from their instruments.
Like turns to unadulterated awe during a song I later discover is called We Shall Rule. It’s not just the doom-laden bass riff and the way that final drawling note hangs portentously before swinging around for another go. It’s not just the extra kick from Jem’s high-hat striking exactly when Mike hits those rumbling bass notes. And it’s not just the disjointed counterpoint of Jace’s guitar.
It’s the hypnotic build-up. The repetition that’s a slow evolution and intensification: the disjointed guitar morphing into a constant fuzz, the cymbal-heavy percussion deepening into rapid fills of snare and toms, the bass driving the tempo ever-faster.
Jace is singing. Then he’s screaming himself hoarse and the drums that so ominously dropped out are back louder than ever and it’s like an apocalypse, no, a post-apocalypse of sound as the vocals devolve into wordless howling collapse and the guitar disintegrates into squelching feedback.
It’s all these things. It’s massive and majestic like watching a nuke go off in slow motion.
