by Greg Prato
Not a lot is known about Fang, other than they penned one of the best punk songs of all time, "The Money Will Roll Right In," a track that has been covered either in the studio or on-stage by the likes of Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Metallica. It's also known that the band hailed from Berkeley, CA, and that their peak creative period was during the early '80s, when they released such underground punk favorites as Landshark and Where the Wild Things Are, which were compiled together on a single CD in 1995 by the Boner label. The 21-track collection kicks off with their aforementioned best-known song, which, lyrically, could have only been written by a punk band in a time before lawsuits ran rampant (due to the mention of a certain actress' name). Elsewhere, there's a hefty amount of tracks that reflect the top U.S. punk acts of the era: the Germs ("Diary of a Mad Werewolf"), Fear ("I've Got a Disease"), and Flipper (the elegantly titled "Suck and Fuck"). And you've got to give Fang some credit for penning a song with a title of "Everybody Makes Me Barf." Although Fang never received the attention that some of their colleagues did, Landshark/Where the Wild Things Are shows that they could riff and snarl with the best of 'em.