Porcella - The Deadly Snakes

Looking back, the whole “garage rock revival” of the early 2000’s was one of my favorite parts of growing up. Having already been exposed to classic rock, the discovery that an entire rock’n’roll culture had been gestating in my own backyard (Detroit) inspired me to delve into the world of garage rock with the kind of wild-eyed intensity that only 14-year-old boys learning about rock’n’roll for the first time ever get. Back then, I would gush about the raw power and hot guitar riffs of just about any group of shaggy-haired dudes with a “the” at the beginning of their band’s name. Then, gradually, I grew up and realized that 90% of garage rock sounds exactly the same, and now I only listen to the best of the bunch. I didn’t know it back then, but one of the very best garage bands of the last decade was a band that I rejected because they weren’t loud enough: The Deadly Snakes. While I was listening to legions of mediocre “mod” or “blues” bands, The Deadly Snakes were a couple hundred miles north, in Toronto, expanding and experimenting with their garage-y sound, adding elements of old-timey folk, carnivalesque blues, and admirably unique psychedelia. In 2003, the Snakes released Ode To Joy, an album stuffed to the gills with white-hot blues-punk. It wasn’t quite as loud or aggressive as The Dirtbombs or, say, Guitar Wolf, so I ignored it. Then, in 2005, they brought Porcella to the table. Let’s just get this out of the way right now then: Porcella isn’t garage rock by any stretch. It sounds like some awesome combination of the Oblivians and the Decemberists: soul-inflected gutter rock meets literary sophistication. The entire album pretty much sums up what I was trying to get at earlier in this review: garage rock is boring without embellishment. The Deadly Snakes embellish the style in the form of strings, horns, various oddly-tuned keyboards, and rather bizarre lyrics about sinking ships, shooting game birds, and other such pursuits. It’s a real trip, and for those of you who still haven’t forgiven garage rock for the travesties of Jet and their ilk, here might be a good place to fall in love all over again.

On the edge of a knife is a calm simplicity.