I feel like I’ve been waiting an eternity for this. Well, it has been 4 years since they emerged, coughing and spitting onto the scene with the ‘Belly’ EP, and that’s an eternity in music and in the fast-paced world we now live. And with their debut album, Snack Family don’t disappoint. It brings a shedload of weirdness, genre hybridity, off-kilter grove and infinite rock ‘n’ roll swagger.
Coming on like Jim Morrison at his most wild, Andrew Plummer croons and whoops over a wonky post-punk rockabilly jazz backing, coloured with hints of Eastern promise. Where do you take this? How do you take this? Inevitably, the majority won’t have the first idea, and it will mess with their heads. It’s their loss, but Snack Family are one of those band who aren’t only the definition of ‘cult’, but who probably will achieve barely a fraction of the success their deserve now, but will be remembered by a small cluster as one of the most incredible bands ever in about a decade.
‘The Strange Outside’ nags away with a repetitive motif and some brazen brass which makes for a striking opener. The thumping rhythm of ‘Automated Lover’ lays down a compelling groove, while the fractal guitars shiver and howl. The formula is simple, and follows the essential rule of the 3 Rs – repetition, repetition, repetition – with additional layers of noise. It mightn’t sound much on paper, but you don’t listen to music on paper: it’s all in the delivery.
‘Lonesome as the Burning Sun’ brings some juddering, jolting industrial strains to the mix, while elsewhere, ‘Repeated Views’, slows things down, and with a deep-throated drawl and downtuned eeriness, drags its way into a swamp that’s both sonic and cerebral. Slow, dark, and sleazy, it’s also strangely alluring. ‘Smile’ brings anxietized, twitchy jazz stylings and a gritty, rich-throated growl, and ‘I Am Bunny’ is dark, brooding, sinister, and the sultry female vocal may add a greater melodic focus, but against Plummer’s grainy growl, the tone remains very much on the angular side, and the discordant, angular ‘Love My Dog’ only reinforces this: it’s quirky, jerky, awkward, here bringing in jittery electronics to conjure a stop/start, stuttering mess of jazz-tinged abrasion.
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‘Bunny’ continues the trajectory of their work to date, grinding out low-slung backstreet dirt that throws the best bits of Foetus, PIG, Nick Cave, and Gallon Drunk into the blender. And what a belting job they do of it.
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