Fetish
Silver (Adeline)
by Scott Hefflon
Quite a find, this. As a music editor (allow slight snicker to display contempt for anyone who’d actually call themselves such a ludicrous thing without a heap of ironic eye-twinkling), I listen to shitloads of bands I’ve never heard of so you don’t have to. I get paid for it because, quite frankly, it sucks. As do 3/4s of the bands you’ve never heard of cuz me and most of my peers (there’s that snicker again) and associates (and again) refuse to review them, throw the CDs away and sell the jewel cases for a quarter. Reminds me of a joke about how you can buy blank cassettes for $2 or a John Denver tape for $1, so, in theory, he coulda made more money if he hadn’t recorded music. Hmmm.
Anyway, Fetish isn’t like all that. I had a bit of faith simply cuz the band’s on Adeline, a quite reliable label that, while small, interests me with each band they introduce to the world. They just don’t believe in bios. Helpful little things when it comes to knowing who a band is, ya know? So I was interested enough to request every scrap of data accumulated on the band. Big step when the “sell” pile is well-over twice as big as the “we’ll see if I can talk someone into reviewing this” pile. And I find I was right… And I feel good about being able to pick ’em, even after all this time being beaten down by every big-money passing fad The Biz can dream up, everyone twistin’ yer arm to get some coverage for their shit band before their 15 minutes are up and they lose their investment and try to recoup $1 at a time from the bargain bin.
Fetish, like other stuff on Adeline, is hard to peg. They’re, well, weird… Interesting. Unpredictable. And that’s a good thing. The vocalist used to do spoken word, I hear (from the bio), and he has a bit of Jello in him, and a bit of John Hall (King Missile) as well. And musically, there’s a healthy helping of “jump” in there, and seeing as Adeline is Billy Joe’s label, well, that too makes sense. But it’s all that other stuff: the chugging near-metal groove, the whoa-whoa waving, the dark underbelly that peeks out from beneath the happy, rolling vibe, and the overall feeling that something of profound irreverence is wagging its tongue in your peripheral vision.
If you long for the days when punk was as creative and diverse as any other genre (only a little too undesirable in some way to be accepted by the mainstream, a kind of a catch-all term if you think about it), check out Fetish.
(5337 College Ave. #318 Oakland, CA 94618)
