Fang Island

For the Brooklynites of Fang Island, there’s no volume too loud—or riff too bombastic—to be included on their dazzlingly impressive self-titled full-length debut. For Fang Island the album, the young five-piece rips through track after track with a fury that most reserve for Guitar Hero tournaments, mixing hard and fast arrangements with sweet vocal harmonies (“Daisy”) and 8-bit tones (“Life Coach”) for a downright dizzying musical effect. What you get, throughout, is a wonderfully buoyant mix of ELO’s zaniness, ’80s sitcom cheese, and a percussive energy that sounds like it’s coming from a professional marching band. It also begs the question, how must this sound live? While some may say that such an over-the-top debut is debilitating, or even impossible to follow, we just hope it means that we’ll be hearing lots more from these lads in the future.