Review Summary: Spooky scary skeletons
The Silver Snake Unfolds approaches the listener like a horror movie soundtrack. To be clear, not one of those films with a bone-chilling score designed to magnify the tension and make the jump scares even more startling. Rather, it’s a musical selection which provides an ominous and unnerving touch, while maintaining a certain degree of subtlety. In short, one more suited to the atmospheric side of horror, the type wedded to a slow-moving sense of the sinister rather than gratuitous guts and gore.
I don’t get the sense that the members of Wailin Storms would be upset with the last paragraph’s analogy. The North Carolina four-piece draw from a prodigious list of genre influences, running from doom metal through stoner rock, noise rock, and punk (both post and otherwise), all the way to blues and Americana. What unifies it all is a certain Gothic sensibility, the devotion to which manages to fuse together all with a certain common spirit, whether it’s raw, angry punk/noise rock or moody twangy sections influenced by the band’s southern roots. The results are a rather dense album, with Wailin Storms utilizing a wall-of-sound aesthetic in many places. As such, it takes dedication to unpack the finer details of the music. This isn’t to say there aren’t moments which appeal from first listen, though, with the closing one-two punch proving especially compelling: the slow build of the stoner-blues-ish “Concrete Covers Dead Lovers” and the eerie heaviness of closer “Carolina Moon”.
Bringing everything full circle,
The Silver Snake Unfolds is indeed like one of those more atmospheric horror films which I referenced. In my experience, after seeing a movie of that ilk, it’s usually not a particular grotesque image which stays with me, but rather the way the viewing made me feel: the palpable sense of dread, of “something’s not right”. This album works like that too. Sure, there are individual songs which are strong on their own merits, but the larger picture is more important, with a diverse spread of styles coming together into a menacing whole, complete with gloomy and occult-drenched lyrics. This might not be an everyday kind of record, but the nightmarish vibes it produces have their appeal. If nothing else, Halloween is closer than you think.
