The days are getting warm again and soon so will the nights. Every year, there’s always that one record that sticks out on my stereo just as the heat rises, as I start to shift in the night. It comes pulsing, like sweat, and it stays with me until the leaves all die again. It becomes embedded in my head as inherently structural to that particular summer, and hearing those records afterwards becomes immediately nostalgic.
Hooded Fang have returned for their third album and they have managed to quell the craving for this season. Right away, I already felt like these songs had been boiling in my blood. The appropriately slanged title Gravez suggests simultaneous quarrel and quiet, strength and slack. This is an album for saying goodbye to winter wounds. This is an album for summer bruises, cut knees, daydreaming, listlessness.
No matter how much dirt gets in there, I can’t stop chewing on these songs. For every moment of paranoia and panic there’s a hook that reels me in and I’m lost in it, caught in its claws. Title track and opener “Graves” throbs and thrashes just as much as “Thrasher” soothes and brings you back into the light.
Standouts for me are “Wasteland,” where the bass and drums find their most perfect syncopation, and closer “Genes,” which transforms the sound of the entire record into something entirely new, making me already wonder what these kids are going to cook up next. “Never Minding” feels like it could’ve been a perfect closer—its recurring refrain “my mind is leaving” feels like a perfect summary of how this record makes me feel—but “Genes” really raises the stakes with these lines: “You look to the corner like it’s all okay/I read it in a book that has gone away.”
Where did the book go? I’m not worried. I’ve got the lights off. I’m reading my favourite book in the dark this summer. I’m going to sneak out of the house and fuck shit up. I’m going out to dig gravez. Let’s bury the bodies and go swimming.
