Red Fang kicks off their 20th-anniversary celebrations with the March 14 release of Deep Cuts, an extensive 26-song collection of non-album tracks, covers, and previously unreleased singles.
A preview of the album arrives today with the release of “It’s Always There” (https://orcd.co/redfang-deepcuts), a track from the deluxe version of Whales and Leeches. “I remember really liking the melancholic vibe of ‘It’s Always There,’ but Aaron and I had no vocal ideas coming to mind,” recalls Bryan Giles. “When I lived in San Diego, I became friendly with Pall Jenkins, and was always a fan of Three mile Pilot and The Black Heart Procession, so it was exciting for me to enlist his help bringing the song to life. I think he did a really beautiful job on it!”
Deep Cuts also includes several covers, such as the Wipers’ “Over The Edge,” and Tubeway Army’s “Listen To Sirens,” along with rare Red Fang originals like “Antidote” (from the mobile game, “Red Fang: Headbang!”) and “Wires (demo),” which makes its vinyl debut.
“Perhaps unremarkable to anyone else, it’s fucking amazing to me that we have made it TWENTY YEARS,” Aaron Beam shares. “Before we started jamming in John Sherman’s basement, I’d already been in 40 (maybe more!) bands, none of which lasted more than a year or two. Yet somehow in 2005, for the first time since probably 1987 I found myself without any band to play in. It turned out this was also true of John, David, and Bryan! So it was only natural that we’d start playing together.
All we ever wanted to do was make music that we knew our friends would be stoked to hear at a basement party. Our first show was in David’s basement, and no matter how big the stages were that we ended up playing, we always tried to bring as much of that basement party feeling as we could.
In that regard, this double album feels very much at home. It’s got a sampling of the weird variety of covers that reflect the different shit that inspire us. The computer drum-laden home demo for ‘Wires’ gives a little peek into the process that we pretty rarely but sometimes used for writing (more often than not, all the writing happened in the jam space). There’s of course a generous helping of rare B-sides and bonus tracks that might be hard to find even in today’s digital world. And there’s even a smattering of pretty atypical GarageBand demos that are some of my favorite things to listen to on this record. They could probably never make a regular Red Fang release, but really let you see what is going on in our heads when we’re not banging them!
Please enjoy this record that we are happy to have made for you.”
Deep Cuts is available as a 2xLP set, as well as on CD and digital formats. Pre-orders are available now: https://www.relapse.com/pages/red-fang-deep-cuts.
