The Amazing Snakeheads
Amphetamine Ballads

There must be a reason why even the never too praised Bo Diddley warned us (already in 1962) to “not judge a book by its cover.” But he didn't specify records, so musical preconceptions based on album covers are more than welcome. I've always indulged in this, and I've rarely been completely wrong about the music of a band just by looking at their album's artwork.

Perhaps that's why the cover of “Amphetamine Ballads” by the Scots The Amazing Snakeheads (what a damn name, guys) had already piqued my curiosity and broadly anticipated its content.

And indeed, the python pattern on the cover prefigures the lascivious and subtly morbid aura that oozes from these 10 tracks. Let's be clear: although the references are definitely good if not excellent (Nick Cave solo and with the Birthday Party, Stooges Funhouse period, early Cramps, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), the content is not as incendiary and especially as genuinely dangerous as it should be. It's 2014, baby, and we'll have to make do. But we need more debuts like these.

In short, we have a power trio with unpresentable faces, led by a minimal but very groovy rhythm section, and a singer-guitarist pulled straight from the stands of Glasgow Rangers. Clean faces, but ones you wouldn't want to see outside the pub when the last drink bell rings. Too early to go home, too late to avoid a fight.

Such is the nervously unsettling atmosphere of the record, especially in tracks like “I'm A Vampire”, “Swamp Song” or the beautiful “Flatlining” driven by skeleton-like bass lines suddenly attacked by the singer's wild bellowing and the slashes of his six-string. Additionally a battered sax occasionally barges in, a zombie version of the Funhouse sax by the Stooges.

At times, the combo's necrophilia attempts to resurrect, with excellent results, a Lux Interior caught in a domestic dispute (“Where Is My Knife?”), at others a sort of plagiarism of good old Iggy (“Memories”), up to two sides of Nick Cave, the threateningly jazz one (“Every Guy Wants To Be Her Baby”) and the decadent murder ballad one (“Tiger By The Tail”).

With all due leniency, a full pass.