The Deadly Snakes I: Love Undone (Sympathy For The Record Industry, 1999)

Rock and roll had gotten boring by 1999, both in the popular consciousness and in the underground. With the chart breakthroughs of the Strokes, the White Stripes, and the Hives still a few years off, mainstream music was dominated by rap-metal and lifeless pop rock. Underground music, meanwhile, had tried to embrace rock and roll in the wake of a few exciting garage-punk bands like the New Bomb Turks, the Oblivians, and the Spaceshits, but had been quick to accept attitude and posture in the place of solid records or raging live shows. Magazines like Hit List seemed willing to celebrate, without an honest and critical assessment, any tattoo-spackled group that announced it was the New York Dolls incarnate, which resulted in a flood of watery also-rans saturating the touring circuit, and left adrift the handful of electrifying bands still in existence.

So I was wary of the first few, then the first bunch, then the multitude of positive reviews I heard of Love Undone by the Deadly Snakes. It had gotten hard to trust any recommendation of a new rock and roll band, and I had accumulated, on bad advice, enough unlistenable records decorated with devils, hot rods, and pin-up girls to be suspicious of hype. Thus, when I finally gave in and picked up Love Undone a while later, I expected only mediocrity, and was totally flattened by what I heard.

Nearly ten years on, Love Undone remains a fresh and exciting record, but on its release it was as important as it was great. In 1999, Love Undone was a youthful exclamation in a room full of weary voices, and a breath of life into the still corpse of a genre many had given up for dead. More than anything it was a lot of fun. While their tired garage-rock peers aped the Stooges and the MC5 because that’s where the money was, the Deadly Snakes played rock and roll because it felt good, and listening to their record you consequently feel good too.

Love Undone’s liner notes state it plainly: the album, they say, “is a rally call to abandon irony and play from your soul – to be young and to be bold,” and that captures perfectly the album’s point of view. This record does not want you to dress in ugly clothes and coolly bob your head to shitty music as a way of implying you have style and like to rock and roll. Instead, this record wants you, as whoever you are, to play it loud and fly off the handle dancing to it. You’re supposed to bump into people, knock things over, break stuff, get someone’s drink down your shirt, and wear it all with a grin—because it sounds that good.

From the cacophony of drums and cymbals, guitar, and smashed sloppy piano that begins “Bone Dry,” the album’s brazen two-chord opener, to the sudden arrival of a horn section actually used to punctuate and underline as horns should be, Love Undone begins clearly in pursuit of a good time. But it’s the second song, the album’s title track, that serves as the record’s statement of purpose, the centre to which each song will return, in different ways and from different angles. The torrent of guitar, harmonica, and drums that begins “Love Undone” blasts the listener like a firehouse of sound before tumbling into verses defined by a drum line of loosely rocking rolls, around which the guitar and harmonica and saxophone circle each other, occasionally colliding in feedback. You could call this garage-rock and in a sense you’d be right, but if it sounds like The Sonics or the Count Five at their best, it’s because the Snakes are, like their garage forbears, snotty white kids who want to play wild blues and soul, and are doing what they can to serve that purpose with what they have. Love Undone is respectful only to its R&B influences, and everyone else can go to hell.

The sound of Love Undone is hard to explain—most people would call it a lo-fi album, which it is, but not in the sense that it’s as poorly or lackadaisically played as many “lo-fi” records. It sounds, rather, like it was recorded on ancient equipment that it totally overwhelmed, but the extent to which it surpasses its recording technology is also a measure of exhilaration. Something about the tinny, grimy recording demands that you turn it up— maybe, at first, because you’re trying to hear it better— but the louder it gets, the more you feel like knocking over tables. Love Undone, from start to finish, is as much an enabler as it is an album —it quickly becomes a rowdy friend who inspires you to behave just as badly as he does.

Like all subsequent Snakes records, Love Undone features no instrument effects and a minimum of production interference. It was recorded almost entirely live. The band, as I understand it, sought to capture as plainly as possible what they sounded like playing their instruments together, and did nothing to varnish any part of that. Their “we-are-what-we-are” stance is reflected in the album’s cover photo, a hideous portrait of the band looking gawky and unhealthy, their mouths hanging oafishly open, which seems to suggest they were too busy playing music to pose for a retake. Many people, myself included, may find this approach to be achingly sincere, but it is, in equal measure, also incredibly cocky (from a band already cocky enough to open their debut album with a two-chord song). It passes unspoken judgment on the entirety of the rest of the music industry by suggesting that careful record production is the refuge of those who can’t play well enough to sell their product straight.

Raucous and unadulterated, this record twitches with energy. Every member of the band plays his instrument as though he’s trying to damage it, and Andre “St Clair” Ethier wails and howls every lyric. The quiet songs (the sobering-up “Sweet Sixteen” and the achingly ominous “Cotton Stained Red”) are loud, so the loud songs are even louder, rollicking at least, and frenzied mayhem at their best. Perhaps surprisingly, the album’s best number is a riotous reworking of the spiritual “Down By The Riverside” into “Shake By The Riverside,” a call and response dance number driven by handclaps, restless organ, and a positively throbbing rhythm section, over which the horns and fierce guitar clamour into prominence. It takes significant effort to sit still when this song is playing, and more than any of the many high points on Love Undone, “Shake By The Riverside” fulfils D. Boon’s dictum that a record be a flyer for the band’s live show. It’s hard, listening to music this hot and good, not to want to be at the front of a room full of friends losing their minds together while the band goes crazy before you.

That’s what this album is about, after all. As the liner notes explain, the 12 songs that compose Love Undone “reflect the loyalties, grudges, wild nights, and heartbreaks of six longtime friends.” It’s natural to listen to this album and think of your own friends, because it’s good time music, and who would you rather have beside you for the good times? The Deadly Snakes had one another, and as a result, we get an uncommonly fine album as a record of their friendship. Thank god.