Elsewhere on this week's new arrivals list, I wrote about a band called Inappropriate Tough Guy Behavior from Australia who just released a killer limited-edition CD on the Aussie label We Empty Rooms. That band featured the rhythm section from C-Blast faves Fire Witch stripping down to a two piece and dishing out some super heavy, mathy sludge rock. Great stuff. Well, here's another new release from We Empty Rooms, and this one also features the drummer from Fire Witch, Jem Maloney, who appears to play in just about every good band that I've heard from Melbourne. So what does Fangs Of A TV Evangelist soud like? Well, they sound a little like the Melvins, but that shouldn't be a surprise. All of the bands on We Empty Rooms owe at least some of their sound to the mighty Melvins, but that's one of the things that I love about this label and the scene that it's documenting - these guys are taking the sludgy, riff-heavy metallic punk of the Melvins and using that as the jumping-off point for their own distinct take on the sound. In the case of Fans Of..., these guys take the angular heavy riffing of early Melvins and stretch it out into elongated riff-workouts with heavy repetition and pounding, simple drumming, creating a heavy hypnotic form of metallic post-punk with some really cool touches (scraped guitar strings, winding gloomy melodies, clean singing, creepy whispered parts) that make 'em stand out from the rest of the Melbourne sludge-thugs. Actually, the more I listened to this, the more it reminds me of a really cool late 80's post-punk band, especially with the gloomy guitar leads that are drenched in chorus, the catchy basslines, and all of the

clean vocals, kinda gothy, very moody sounding, but punched up with a serious dose of metallic heaviness underneath it all. Fans of the rest of the We Empty Rooms roster will dig this too, but Fangs Of... really stick out from the more psych-laden sludge of bands like Fire Witch, and instead seem to channel what sounds like late 80's British post-punk through weighty Melvins riffage. Pretty rad! The record is pressed on black vinyl and comes in a hand-assembled screenprinted jacket, limited to 300 hand numbered copies, and comes with a cdr of all of the tracks on the record.