Hungry For Nothing

The members of New Jersey quartet Fight Amp (formerly known as Fight Amputation) are refreshingly forthright about their admiration for the Amphetamine Reptile bands of the mid-'90s, and the gigantic influence some of its bands — Helmet and Unsane, in particular — have had upon their music. Problem is, the world already has both a Helmet and an Unsane, so this poses somewhat of a problem for the majority of the tracks profiled on Fight Amp's debut full-length, Hungry for Nothing. "Dead Is Dead," "What a Drag," and "Bound and Hagged," in particular, suffer from an inescapable sense of déjà vu. Thankfully, other songs like "Late Bloomer" and the slower-paced "Get High and F**k" manage to broaden beyond this stifling formula of dense, opaque riffs to a (just) slightly wider range of tonal expression, using not only richer guitar textures, but softer, more atmospheric dynamics, to boot. But when even the song named "Samhain" sounds more like Unsane than Glenn Danzig's short-lived horror hardcore crew, you know we're talking a distance of inches here, not miles, removed from those recognizable AmRep aesthetic qualities. Add to that predictably deadpan shouts in the spitting image of Page Hamilton's and Chris Spencer's, plus a complete running time of barely half an hour and, at the end of the day, it becomes impossible to award very high marks to Fight Amp's debut. But for fans of those aforementioned sounds, well...have at it.