Light Pupil Dilate
Snake Wine
6.1
For my first review, I got surgical. For my second, I thought I'd bring bigger knives. But there's nothing that sick here. So we're all gonna play with needles, peroxide, and bandages until we get this thing right.
First off, don't let the Lifeforce Records logo trick you into undoing your ponytail. This is not second-tier Swedish death-thrash. This is second-tier "heavy psycho-dellic airy artsy rifftastic DIY hard rock with indie mathcore tendencies". That quote comes straight from the source. I'm not getting near that one. That's their myspace page talking, without a thesaurus, carelessly spending a wealth of bad adjectives. I wish that I could hack their site and write that this Atlanta quartet parties like it's 1995. Like Snake Wine is about to hit the streets smack dab in the middle of seminal psyche-post-hardcore albums like Dripping Goss' Blowtorch Consequence and Brutal Juice's Mutilation Makes Identification Difficult, and sitting comfortably on the shelf right below the more jugular cutting '95-ers, Quicksand, bringing Manic Compression, and Orange 9mm, delivering Driver Not Included. LPD leans heavier on the first pair of the aforementioned, but with a sound that's still more closed fist than open hand. It's a new-found old-found charged up inebriation that sounds like someone spiked the punch at an Ignite show a long, long time ago. Some of those kids played instruments, in bands. And most of those band practices were never ever the same again. Tainted, their compositions found broader horizons. The guitarist wanted a delay pedal. The drummer wanted bongos. The singer traded a little bit of "pent-up", for a little bit of poetry. The bassist replaced his strings. Things got textural. Sonic hills. Sonic valleys. Shapes and angles. Inhale. Exhale.
While not it's vein pattern exactly, but at times pretty damn close, that's the aura that I see pouring off of Snake Wine. I wasn't thrilled with the description that they tagged themselves if only for a lack of poetry, but they do have it pinned, and then even nailed it for their last six minutes when they penned "Dive". That's the money shot. That's what they're capable of. I can't wait for them to take a knife and spread that out all over the duration of an entire album. I'm looking forward to that. Because then LPD will have it in spades when this particular retro trend swings in their favor. So, yeah, their revivalism is scoring points with me for sure, all the way down to the production job that came back to the future. I was saddened, however, by the non-stick surface. I just can't remember any of this come sun up.
Where's Don Fury when you need him.
