Awesome Snakes

AWESOME SNAKES, THE:

Venom: CD

What is it with all the snake related band names? Off the top of my head I can think of Hot Snakes, The Charming Snakes, These Arms Are Snakes, Iceage Cobra, The Detroit Cobras, and now the Awesome Snakes. There’s almost as many snake bands names as there are wolf band names. If you’re thinking of using wolf or snake in your band name, don’t do it. There are enough other animals to pick from. Other dumb, (or funny, depending on your sense of humor) things about this band: the CD cover has umlauts over the “A’s” and a picture of a cock rocker’s tight leather pants-clad crotch. I’d laugh, but hasn’t making fun of ‘80s cock rock been done to death? All the songs are simple, herky-jerky punk done with just a drummer and a bassist/singer, which makes economical sense for a band since it’s hard enough to make money playing rock’n’roll with three or more people. Maybe they just thought it would sound better with two people, but I can really notice the missing instruments. Other than the songs, which almost all have the word “snakes” in them, there are some music “collages” and sampled old songs with the word “snakes” being thrown in to substitute other words. Overall, this seems like a joke band that must be really funny for the people who made it, but for the rest of us it’s worth listening to maybe once at the most. –Jason Donnerparty (Crustacean)