Snake People

VINYL FORMAT. Balaclavas are from Houston, Texas where everything is eternally blistered, chemically altered, and forlorn. They are a band in the realest sense—they come on like a gang, play with one mind, hunt in one pack, party and fight together in a flat wild nowhere. Unlike the common livestock being unloaded into music this is a band of predators. Perpetual outsiders; there will always be a wrong side of the tracks and they'll always be from it. Roman Holiday was a paean to Caligulan excess; Snake People is a declaration of jihad. "Legs Control" comes in with a disorienting desert wind that claws at your ears. From the start, you are alone with them in an alien landscape. There is something in the proliferation of forms that offends the thinking and feeling eye. Snake People gives voice to that eye. Forward seeing, clear in its intonation when it sends back the baby food being brought out on an unending succession of plates. Ennio Morricone and scratchy noise guitars on storm-dub rhythms like if the heaviest incarnation of 1970s Pink Floyd were a future punk band invested by Jodorowsky to score Dune. You can hear storms approaching and sandworms underfoot. Its an evil dance they're bringing.