MAJOR IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS PART OF THE BOX SET Doesn't Exist II: The Complete Recordings

Imagine an average day for yourself and the people you typically come across - the guy from the gym who’s always on the treadmill next to you, the clerk at the supermarket who rings you up at the exact same time each week, the coworker with the eerily similar lunch breaks, the neighbors who nod and wave whenever they pass by with their dogs. Now, imagine that during these run-ins, each one of them gives you a high-five. They don’t say why. It’s just because. It would be kinda strange, right? Maybe you’d think that you were being subjected to a conceptual art project? But would you end your day in a much, much better mood? Even the average day is filled with good deeds, quiet accomplishments and subtle kindness that goes unacknowledged without a nudge, some break in the stasis that says, “I see you and you deserve to have your triumphs acknowledged.”  

This was the philosophy that Jason Bartell, Chris Georges, Pete Watts and Phil Curcuru ascribed to as Rhode Island School of Design students, before they ever pinched the name “Fang Island” from a classic The Onion article. “For some reason, high-fiving was just how we greeted each other every day,” Georges recalls, which would soon evolve into their oft-repeated M.O. - they sounded a little bit like ‘80s metal, a little bit like day-glo hardcore, a little bit like a cheerleading squad, but always like “everyone high-fiving everyone.”  

Fang Island were here for a good time, and it ended up being a long time - a decade passed from those first wild and wooly jam sessions in 2004 to their final gig at a Barcelona festival.  In between came two albums (2010’s Fang Island and 2012’s Major) and two EPs now being reissued on, fittingly enough, Joyful Noise - a label that would need to be invented to embody the spirit of Fang Island if it didn’t already exist.   

“Can we do this? Is this too goofy? If it made us laugh, we were on the right track,” Georges explains of their quality control. Doesn’t Exist II: The Complete Recordings is rife with moments that validate this approach - the triple-tracked guitarmonies that fade in from the sound of fireworks on “Careful Crossers,” “the “Jack and Diane”-style acoustic riff that splits “Sideswiper” in half, the organ drone on “Daisy,” the wah-wah guitars of “Sisterly,” the country-fried licks of “Dooney Rock.” “It’s really tricky because it can get real cheesy real fast,” Bartell concurs. As Georges succinctly describes the approach: “it was always trying to capture what was what felt musically true about the band.”  

Initially intended as a front for their printmaking majors, Fang Island began with Georges and Bartell taking full advantage of Providence’s curious college town status. Most students lived in warehouses and apartments rather than dorms, creating a robust art scene with little to no oversight or noise ordinances. The Complete Recordings serves as a bookend to Fang Island’s first EP, Doesn’t Exist, whose flippant title belied their hands-on, DIY boosterism; the physical copies came with a handmade box filled with friendship bracelets and sealed with wax and ribbons. No matter where they went, Fang Island’s up-with-people approach made them a subversive art project by default. At a time when the belligerent noise-rock of Lightning Bolt and The Body defined Providence, Fang Island played major-key guitar harmonies and flashy tapping riffs. When people tried to call them “math-rock,” they thought of themselves as “recess rock.” Fang Island shared bills with uber-buzzy bands like Yeasayer and Chairlift at Cake Shop and Santos Party House, crucibles for Brooklyn hype at the turn of the aughts; but their most impactful co-sign came from Andrew WK.  

At least until Fang Island earned an unexpected Best New Music review at Pitchfork; in the style of the time, the group - now including drummer Marc St. Sauver and guitarist Nick Sadler - were thrust from playing “literally empty shows” at hot dog stands in Ohio to becoming the toast of SXSW and starting their North American tour with psych-rock idols the Flaming Lips in an Atlantic City casino. They would later play sprawling amphitheaters with Stone Temple Pilots, and in perhaps the best demonstration of their ability to wield pop smarts to guitar pyrotechnics, both Matt & Kim and Coheed & Cambria.  

Two years after Fang Island released what they expected to be their first and only album, Major became the “highly anticipated sophomore LP.” The songs were bigger, shinier and hookier, forged under the pressure that comes with being a band rather than a couple of weekend warriors - label pressures, grueling tours and the frequent personnel changes that ultimately brought the band to their amicable end. Fang Island began with the crackle fireworks and, as the band heard fireworks going off in the distance as they played in Barcelona, they took it as a supernatural sign that this show would be the perfect bookend to their career. “We were getting older, we were in serious relationships, we were getting tired, and that just felt like the right way to end it.” 

Fang Island are self-admittedly nostalgic people, so it’s fair play if this vinyl reissue brings you back to that very specific period of indie aesthetics - the Dirty Laundry interview series, tall cans of Sparks Ultra, The Buried Life, Daytrotter, Billboard Heatseekers. But Fang Island’s music has been reanimated by a subsequent decade where their one-of-one output now sounds prescient - in 2012, Japandroids began their album with a recording of fireworks and created a genre name that would soon encompass Fang Island: “celebration rock.” As one of the first hits on Sargent House, Fang Island helped establish one of the label’s core tenets of hyper-melodic, technically proficient prog that included Tera Melos and TTNG. Meanwhile, if a record with as much finger-tapping and gang vocals as Fang Island were released in 2024, it’d be the toast of fifth-wave emo. But even if the whole of indie rock has caught up to the sound of Fang Island ten years after the fact, well…as divisions are driven deeper than ever, the spirit of “everyone high-fiving everyone” will forever remain insurgent.