Hooded Fang - Venus on Edge

Pitchfork 73

Hooded Fang emerged in 2008 like many Canadian bands of the era, crowding the stage with seven players and offering upbeat artisanal indie-pop with the then-requisite glockenspiels and trombones. But in Daniel Lee’s sly, sonorous vocals, you sensed an eccentric streak lurking, and he and bassist April Aliermo weren’t afraid to unleash it through other projects. Outside Hooded Fang, the two have betrayed a fondness for heaving hardcore (as Tonkapuma) and day-glo electro-pop (Phédre), while Lee has flexed some Krautrockin’ funk in his solo Lee Paradise project. Meanwhile, Hooded Fang shed its keyboardists and brass section, and as its line-up got leaner, its sound has become progressively meaner.

Hooded Fang’s fourth album, Venus on Edge, represents the next step in an evolutionary process. The transformation began in earnest with 2011’s Tosta Mista, which scuffed up the band’s formative indie-pop sensibility with a Modern Lovers scrappiness. That aesthetic was pushed deeper into the red with the grotty garage rock of 2013’s Gravez. But Venus on Edge is even more weird and wired, marking the moment where Hooded Fang’s fantastical name ceases to be an ironic counterpoint to the band’s playful fuzz-pop and becomes a guiding principle.

The new record also turns a page on proto-punk completely in favor of weirder turf: industrialized dissonance, sci-fi surf-punk, and tweaked-out guitar frequencies that ring out like a biohazard lab activating the meltdown siren. Lee’s cool, conversational voice melds into the artfully mutated noise swirling around him, as he breaks down his melodies into staccato communiqués.

But as Hooded Fang’s music has grown wilder, their lyrical focus has become more concrete. Venus on Edge is another springtime release from a Toronto act presenting views from the 6, though, as Hooded Fang would tell you, any view view of that city is inevitably obstructed by friggin’ condos. Where Drake invokes Toronto as a visual and thematic backdrop, Hooded Fang treat the city as a target, a place where gentrification, smartphone dependency, and pandering lifestyle marketing have run amok: “Plastic Love” depicts big-business branding as an exercise in Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style mind control, complete with a wonderfully wiggy B-52s-style breakdown; “Glass Shadows” channels the dispiriting feeling of walking among the high-density, high-rise developments that loom ominously over city’s downtown core, with Lee darting around the song’s jabbing riff as if he were trying to avoid the panes of glass that frequently rain down from Toronto’s shoddily built towers.

And while Toronto’s rich multiculturalism is an oft-advertised point of civic pride, Hooded Fang are nonetheless one of the few mixed-race bands in the city’s indie-rock scene, a circumstance that informs Venus on Edge’s most agitated tracks. Where the frantic “Impressions” spins an alien-visitation yarn to highlight the corrosive effects of xenophobia, the pin-pricked, new-waved rave-up “Shallow” sings of unchecked white privilege as a festering disease: “You’re no iconoclast/Blinded all your life by the paleness of your sight/It’s a sickness/You can’t see what’s going on.” The target of the song is unnamed, but it’s not a stretch to assume it’s directed at the band formerly known as Viet Cong, given the instrumental role Aliermo played in mobilizing the protest to get them to change their name.

Over the course of its 10 tracks, Venus on Edge’s warping effects do start to normalize somewhat, like when you stare into a funhouse mirror for an extended period and your eyes get used to the distended shapes. Even as its songs twist into new shapes, the dynamic between the band’s relentless racket and Lee’s casual tone never wavers, to the point where the transformation of the finale “Venus” from deconstructed blues dirge to high-speed sprint feels less dramatic than intended. But, on an album that’s about keeping your cool in the face of mounting frustration, perhaps that resolute stance is just a defense mechanism. With Venus on Edge, Hooded Fang are the stars of their own horror flick, playing the last surviving rational humans in a city overrun with mind-numbed, inconsiderate, glass-eyed drones. And like all good scary movies, there’s a plot twist: this one’s actually a documentary.