Hot Snakes
Automatic Midnight

THE REVIEW

Scalding snakes. Not the latest episode of Wild, nor a new age cooking class, nor low-level jokes from a fourth district cabaret. They debuted, after the ashes of Drives Like Jehu, taking what matters, and what they took.

A record that's fierce, ruthless, contemptuous, impatient with themselves as well as with the listener. In other words, a pissed-off album, that smells of streets, that is, of stale beer, of dawns spent walking on dusty tracks. One should linger on the guitars, crystalline neuroses sequenced into dirty and imprecise distortions. The melody, the real essential snake, slithers ungratefully under every song, forming its scoliosis-like backbone. Immoral music, for people who spend their lives chasing their own candle. Outcasts, you who read, woe to you if you do not listen to songs like "No Hands," "Past Lives," or that crippled masterpiece "Light Up The Stars."

Provincialism and sweat, anarchic America, and disillusionment from adolescent stoners. Semen that goes rancid on your pristine epithelia, reinvigorating the spirit. Neither San Diego will know better, nor will my apathy, nor yours, nor that of your deceased grandmother.