- Hal·low·een /ˌhaləˈwēn,ˌhäləˈwēn/ noun - the night of October 31, the eve of All Saints' Day, commonly celebrated by children who dress in costume and go door-to-door asking for candy.
- shoe·horn /ˈSHo͞oˌ(h)ôrn/ verb - force into an inadequate space.
My hometown of Arlington, Texas had an urban legend known as the Arkansas House. If that sentence seems geographically confusing, just know that it's in reference to a street called Arkansas Lane and not a neighboring state. The house sat far back from the street and was obscured from view by a mass of trees and shrubbery. The property was actually positioned above the sidewalk, on top of a concrete wall. I even heard a rumor that the street was actually lowered to further hide the house from public view, but I suspect that information is just as dodgy as the rest of the stories involving the location.
The majority of the stories revolved around the mentally ill or deranged son of a couple who lived in the house who murdered his parents. Another story was similar, but instead told about a butcher who slaughtered his family and stored them in a basement freezer. Real 'Burbs type shit.
When I was in high school the house was infamous among the local teenage populace who regularly trespassed on the property for cheap thrills, and who regularly got busted by the cops.
The first time my friends and I went there it was a scene straight out of your stereotypical horror movie. It was a blue, moonlit night and we parked our car a street over and walked down to the property. We had to cross over what looked like a downed telephone pole that I guess was supposed to be a barrier of some kind. What I assumed was the gravel driveway was a serpentine, overgrown trail that cut through a small wilderness. We were first greeted with a cliché, yet still creepy disemboweled stuffed animal in the middle of the path. When we arrived at the house it was everything that you would expect of a home with with the aforementioned notoriety. Apart from the moonlight ominously illuminating a second story window, the house was unsettlingly dark. It was the kind of dark a house completely void of electricity and removed from street lights would be. In front of the house was the token dead tree with its twisted branches. The whole facade looked like a vintage Halloween die-cut that adorned the wood paneled walls of my 1980's childhood.
So with this visage looming before us and the story of the familicidal butcher at the forefront of our minds, my friends and I heard a series of loud bangs—or perhaps chops! Chops like that of a murderous meat cleaver on a blood soaked wooden block. Well, I happened to be in the lead of our small intrepid group and at the sound of these "chops" I turned to confer with my friends only to see that they had fled in terror. It was literally like a Scooby-Doo cartoon where all that was left of them were dissipating clouds of dust in the shape of their bodies and the distant sounds of sneakers on gravel. I had been abandoned to meet my end via murder-by-ghost, so I naturally ran as well.
As the more practical among you might have guessed, those bangs were not the residual sounds of a long ago suburban tragedy. They were, in fact, the fireworks from the nearby Arlington baseball stadium. Apparently when the Texas Rangers would get a home run the stadium would let off a series of celebratory firework volleys.
We had a good scare and thankfully avoided law enforcement that night. We went back a few more times and explored the house in depth, but never had a fright quite like that first time. The last time I went to the house was probably fifteen years ago. I took my brother there on Halloween just to see if it was still there. We arrived in the morning only to find the house completely gone. All that was left were the varying tiled floors of all the different rooms and a vandalized basement full of spray painted pentagrams. It remains the only house in Texas that I've seen with a basement. Perhaps this architectural anomaly was the genesis of the house's lore.
What does this story have to do with grindcore or the band Snagg? Well, nothing, really. Texas, maybe? It's hard to theme a holiday episode around grindcore reviews. It's a genre that doesn't lend itself well to spine tingles and scary tales. However, there is a reason why most Texas horror movies take place under the sun. The hot, stifling weather is a monster in its own right. Everything within the environment is heat-cracked and sunbleached, warped and deranged, feral and ravenous.
Houston, Texas' Snagg and their low-fi, Texas-fried brand of brutal grind-violence is just the fit for my spoonfed horror film metaphor. Snagg's sound isn't that California high-and-tight style of grind-violence. The band's brand of grind is a noisey, stop-and-go mix of throwback powerviolence and brutal Gulf Coast grindcore. There might even be a little goregrind spattered on it if you let that South Texas sun hit it just right. Their sound definitely evokes the more grimy of the B horror movies, if we are keeping with the same theatrical thematic trope.
Snagg's 2023 album, Inside Looking Out, and its fuzzy spider-legged noise and distant analog mix are just as distorted as the Texas heat, just as grainy as the sixteen millimeter film stock of our fright flick, just as sick as the eyeball mutilating scene from the Japanese film Splatter: Naked Blood that is Xeroxed on the album's cover. In the introduction to the opening track, "Hypnocil," (the name of a fictional sleep medication from the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) Snagg introduces a raw grindhouse grit, complete with the cracks and pops of the vinyl effects that give way to the smatterings of movie sound clips.
Snagg's instrumental lineup merely consists of a bass and drum kit. So in lieu of a guitar there is only a bonfire of ambiguous white noise chaos blaring from a growling bassline that sits at the subterranean core of each song. It's sort of reminiscent of noise-grind albums like Insect Warfare's self-titled pink pressed vinyl, only with more structure, and intention, and actual riffs.
In my opinion, drum and bass power violence/grindcore bands can be hit and miss. When they do work it tends to be thanks in large part to A) the speed of the drums and B) the distortion of the bass guitar.
The drums are fast and ballistic and are the main reason that a hint of goregrind flavoring hits my lips. The band reminds me of a power violence version of Sulfuric Cautery. Mainly, the low-fi mix, the incessant pinging of that trash can snare drum, and the coarse gutturals that sound like rocks in a blender. However, the drums can be plodding, keeping with that Crossed Out style of power violence.
The fiery distortion of the bass guitar really fills out the sound—especially in the more frenetic playing. Meanwhile, the core bass sound is more obvious in the slower paced portions. There is a subconscious ambiguity at work when listening to Inside Looking Out. You can almost hear the differentiation between the bass and where the standard electric guitar would be. You can perhaps hear a bassline as a solo and then hear that same bass and know that it is acting as both guitar and bass within a full band.
Inside Looking Out is an exploitative, celluloid torn, washed-out, bloodbath of a slasher flick by way of a grindcore album. The bass and drum lineup is not an impediment, but a barbaric and savage strength. Snagg are able to balance the heft of grindcore, yet wield the sporadicness of power violence.
They're a perfect example of a more down and dirty version of grind-violence. The band also seems to be fully aware of what they are and completely embrace the low-fi and noisey temperament of it. I'm fairly sure their 2022 CD, Play Faster was the band's initial review submission, but I enjoyed Inside Looking Out much more.
Inside Looking Out could be the barbarous soundtrack to a cross-cut scene of Leatherface chasing Sally through a tangle of brambles throughout the rural Texas night. The mid-paced footfalls against the fast-paced chainsaw couldn't be more grind-violence. We, the listener, could envision ourselves running right along poor Sally. We might run and hide and run and hide, eventually hiding in a corner, attempting to catch our panicking breath and stifle our sobs. In our periphery, we would hear the chainsaw idle and then cut out with a rattling gurgle. Our heartbeat would race through our veins as the cacophony of environmental insect chatter engulfed our senses. Did we possibly hear a twig snap to our left? Maybe a shuffle of leaves to our right? Then... VROOM!!! The raging, whirling, and buzzing comes screaming out of the darkness, roaring towards our terrified faces! That, and the album also kind of sounds like you dropped your cell phone in the toilet and now there's water in that little speaker hole.
FFO: Pizza Hi-Five, Sordo, Sea Of Shit
Listen to the album:
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| The Arkansas House basement. |
