Hooded Fang – Tosta Mista

Album Review by Chris Cusack | 29 Feb 2012
Album title: Tosta Mista
Artist: Hooded Fang
Label: Full Time Hobby
Release date: 12 Mar

To say Hooded Fang are retro is akin to saying Lemmy likes the odd drink. The Canadian outfit are quick to acknowledge their debt to the 60s and the explosion of garage rock that it heralded, yet that influence is so overwhelming that you have to wonder if the band have grown up in a musical vacuum. Certainly there are a few well-penned numbers on display, including Brahma and the vaguely contemporary Jubb, but there remains a pervasive underlying sense of irrelevance.

Hundreds of excellent albums of a near identical ilk already exist and have done for some time. Hooded Fang may well bask in the admiration of kitsch retrophiles and unschooled twee pop acolytes but surely it's not too much to ask that, at some point in the intervening 50 years, musicians attempt to bring something new to the garage rock table. This is capable and good-natured stuff, but it is also uninspired and really quite lazy.

http://www.hoodedfang.com