Review Summary: Grazing berserkers..
Who knows what kind of debased overflow of alternative folk/country would have flooded the Midwest in the 90’s, had the farming industry in America not collapsed the previous decade? The region’s younger generations were stranded with such grim lots, that you could say the rise of the frenzied noise and sludge of God Bullies, Cows, Big Black and Killdozer was therapeutic adaptation more than anything. Killdozer at any rate, don’t consider the issue a particular mystery.
The tedium of rural Wisconsin is stamped into every brutalized note of
Snakeboy. Small-town depression, grain silos, cow fields half-abandoned as American agriculture withers, right-wing nut-jobs, f*cking in mud, ordinary monotonous death.
Lecherous opener “King of Sex” is one of the band’s oldest staples, cheeky, pert, and formidably insipid. Apathetic female backing vocals bind the song in bleak sexuality, a picture of a self-satisfied man pumping behind a bored woman. The band crash out of their measured chug on “River,” even splicing in a pitchy violin. Toothsomely evil guitar-work drives “Live Your Life Like You Don’t Exist” and “Gone to Heaven.” Crisp, reverberating bass forms the sneaking spine of “Burning House,” and closer “Fifty Seven” is stacked with a careening, drunken wobble.
Killdozer remain known for their punishingly straightforward covers, and on
Snakeboy, Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” gets the frontal lobotomy treatment. A persistent presence during live shows, where the amped crowd could thrust the song up to the rafters, it falls a bit flat on record, but does come decked-out with a spaced-out, drawling solo. For what this music and scene are, there isn’t an overtly weak track here. Still, swallowing all of
Snakeboy in one sitting can at times feel like taking a lash to the cerebrum.
It was no surprise that Killdozer’s stiff-necked, steel-toed brand of noise punk eventually brought Steve Albini into their timeline. His propensities for engineering compressed barrages of guitars tightened up the band’s already constricted approach into a shattering onslaught. And though that lent the band a new terrifying tier of gnashing stompers,
Snakeboy is just as, if not more important a peak in Killdozer’s chronology. Tough and pointed, and just shambolic enough to let you know that there’s a heart pulsing behind that implacable grind.
