These Arms Are Snakes - Happy Easter From Under The Space Needle
Steve Snere comes to me live from the perpetually rain-swept streets of Seattle circa 4pm his time, going somewhere; anywhere. At times it sounds as if he’s sat in laidback traffic – replete with distant tooting and the faint blur of an open driver’s side window – or perhaps even sequestered amidst the tightly spaced tables and clinking hubbub of a little café somewhere at the feet of the Space Needle.
Much like the divergent allure of These Arms Are Snakes itself, I imagine the man to be weaving a quixotic tangent through the city that serves to highlight and underline the ebb and flow of whatever he’s in the process of trying to articulate. A left onto Cedar Street, down a laneway and across the park, stopping to fish through a corduroy pocket for loose change to pick up a paper with – rarely does anything travel in a rigidly straight line, befitting the restless angularity of the band he calls home to as vocalist and frontman. The point is always made, but it must be in the process of actively making itself.
Steve speaks in a series of amiable stop-starts – a tangle of jumbled and rearranged sentences, the phrasing and tone of which he never seems quite satisfied enough with to let go off. Perhaps it’s his palpable excitement at These Arms Are Snakes’ looming tour of Australia alongside ocean-sized Boston metal savants Isis.
“I’ve always wanted to get down there,” he beams, “so it’s nice that we can figure out a way to do it without the money coming straight outta our pockets. It’s just after the tour of Japan too, so we’re coming from Japan right over there. We lucked out with this,” he breathes, the faint bustle of downtown ant lines at his back.
“We’d been talking to some people in the past but nothing ever got finalised. But then with Isis, with a larger band like that, it just gives us the opportunity to come over and do it really easily. It’s fucken awesome, man. Can’t wait.”
These Arms Are Snakes’ debut longplayer – 2004’s verbosely-titled Oxeneers Or The Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home – singled out the band for their elongated displays of obscurity almost as much as for the fact that within their ranks throbs bassist Brian Cook, whom formerly brang up the bottom for legendary Seattle mathcore crew Botch.
“At first we were definitely like, the new ‘Botch band’ or whatever. But pretty quickly it was established that we don’t sound like that at all, so I think we’ve either developed some of their fanbase, or lost a lot of their fanbase that are not into what we’re doing,” he laughs, “and then gained our own – I think we’ve kinda become our own individuals and you know, I don’t disrespect the fact that people like Botch ‘cause they were a good band and it’s like, you know, people like it, they like it and maybe they’ll get turned onto us. It doesn’t really bother me. I think at this point there’s These Arms Are Snakes or there’s Botch, but Brian still gets it all the time. It’s always ‘Rock Lobster’!” Steve chuckles his good-natured chuckle, referring to Botch’s infamously hard-edged cover of the B-52’s classic from Unifying Themes Redux.
It seems likely that, given the thorough airing it is about to receive, 2006’s Easter will accumulate its own amount of critical acclaim. A vastly improved work ethic, a new drummer (Chris Common, their third skinsman) and a much more relaxed schedule than what was allowed for during the recording of Oxeneers… means that Easter has emerged as a far more mature-minded and cohesive package. Admittedly its titling does give the album a faintly religious vibe, but These Arms Are Snakes have never been keen on living in one dimension.
“It deals with religion, but also spirituality,” Steve asserts. “I don’t consider myself to be a religious person by any means, but I do believe myself to be a spiritual person and I don’t stick to any religion. I think that you should be able to go from one thing to another and believe aspects of whatever you want versus one set mindset; which kind of then evolves into where people see that it’s almost like taking stabs at religion. Especially in America here, we’re just run on all-Christian morals and it affects all our people’s lives, and even people’s lives that aren’t Christian. Gay marriages aren’t allowed because it says in the bible that it’s not supposed to be, which is bullshit. Straight people can get married and get tax reductions and all this other bullshit, so why can’t the gay community? It’s not good for ‘the people’, it’s good for Christians and what they believe, so it just doesn’t make sense. So in that regard there’s some attacks on that shit, but I think we kinda transcend into a spiritual realm of things – that’s kinda what I was going for.”
It’s interesting to note that, whilst These Arms travel a far lighter and less outwardly fierce road to that of Botch, in terms of how obscurely their psychedelic anarchy manifests their diverging roads meet again almost squarely in the middle. The middle of a heated debate over God-knows-what fought with what-the-hell, and you’d perhaps do well to wager twenty quazars on the newcomer – ‘Conceptive city soon to contract and birth a child of its own rats’ is but one of Easter’s many hidden lyrical trinkets that hide, strung from a tree or stuffed under the house, ready and waiting to be devoured and digested.
“I think leaving some things open to interpretation is what it’s all about. I just saw David Lynch’s new movie last night and he was there at the premiere here of it in Seattle, and there was a Q & A with him. Someone got up and asked, ‘I know you’re not gonna tell us, but what did this movie mean?’, and his response was, ‘The more you use words to represent a film, it takes away from what the film actually is.’ I thought that was a good way to describe a lot of things with music, too. I don’t think everything should be so cut and dry. It’s there for you to take away what you want from it, or fucken leave it alone completely.”
Happy Easter to you too, Steve.
