By pushing past what was ever imaginable within the parameters of hardcore, These Arms Are Snakes, along with the likes of Portugal The Man, Isis and longtime experimental forerunners Neurosis, have created an astoundingly fertile creative atmosphere in today’s heavy music.
Where other likeminded acts tend to work on either refining their sound or making overtly jagged style shifts,These Arms walks the line between. For bassist Brian Cook, who also plays in quasi progmetal trio Russian Circles and is an alumnus of legendary mathcore outfit Botch, evolution has become an imperative. He and the rest of the band adamantly insist that every album must deviate dramatically from the last—and set out to do so whenever they begin to write, which is always in a narrow timeframe just before the band is scheduled to record. Still, what stands out about These Arms is not so much Cook and company’s sense of reach, but how the band manages to rework its influences into a fresh but cohesive work every time.
Perhaps the discrepancies between each band member’s sense of where the group should venture, and the tension that ensues, helps These Arms arrive at permutations that sound natural.
“Steve [Snere, vocals] and I are the two guys in the band that are the bigger record nerds,” says Cook. “We’re like, ‘oh man, we gotta do this shit because it’s so trippy.’We’re the guys that want to keep moving it more and more out there.Whereas Ryan [Frederiksen, guitar] and Chris [Common, drums, production] are like ‘no, we’ve got to keep this structured in a more basic rock format.’They think we’ve got to be realistic, while Steve and I are hearing Can and Wolf Eyes—obnoxious textures, but really simple patterns over and over again.We can sit there and talk about that, but when it actually comes to being in the practice space, we have to figure out how to take those elements and put them into a template that’s more in mind with traditional punk music.”
“Right now,” he continues, “Steve’s like ‘fuck it, I want to sound like Suicide; I want to be as minimal as possible and extrapolate on these really basic sound scapes.’ Hey, I’m right on board, but I know at the end of the day, when you’ve got four people working towards that, it’s not going to sound anything like that.”
Still, with both the band’s latest album, Tail Swallower and Dove, and its predecessor, Easter, there’s plenty of horizon chasing for intrepid listeners to dig into—and for puritanical Botch fanatics to bitch about. In fact, there are simply too many shades to adequately sum up the band’s breadth. More akin to the tradition of 1970s hard rock, however, than the kitchen-sink eclecticism of today’s avant-aggro community, both albums offer a rich sonic world for the listener to step into.
But Cook insists that, for all their intentions, the band members have little control over the final outcome. Tail Swallower, he notes, sounds nothing like either Can or Wolf Eyes.
“The handful of time times we’ve tried to talk about what we want to achieve on the front end of things, it didn’t work,” he says. “We just don’t seem to operate that way. I admire people that are able to establish a game plan and then go in, work and re-work, and finely tune their vision so that they’re able to craft something that’s completely pre-meditated.”
“But,” he laughs, “I’ve never had any luck doing that.”
On the other hand, not having too much time to over-think also helps.
“The one advantage to the fact that we tour a lot,” Cook explains, “and that we have to cram all of our writing into these short blocks of time right before we go into the studio is that it puts these long gaps between our creative period. It inevitably winds up that we move away from what we’ve done in the past to a certain degree. The next time we do a record, I would like to see an even larger leap into another style.”
Hasn’t he said that each time?
“I feel like I do,” he laughs. “But dammit,” he jokes, “this time I mean it.”
Regardless, These
Arms’ desire to stretch allows the band to establish a more varied
emotional palette as well. And, though the band describes its own
outlook as bitter and negativistic, Tail Swallower and Easter both
offer much more than your standard angst-ridden fare. Botch may have
dressed up its despair in an outer shell of detached cynicism and rage
that was too smart for its own good, but it was still one-dimensional
in the end compared to These Arms’ sonically brilliant brand of
moodiness. In fact, you could go as far as saying that, by painting
compelling pictures of grownup malaise,These Arms are ushering their
generation or hardcore fans into adulthood.
Cook doesn’t
necessarily see it that way. “I feel like we’re generally still a
negative band,” he answers. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of
triumph or uplifting moments in our music. I think it all still tends
to be lashing-out more than anything else.We’re a pretty negative
bunch.We’re all friends, but writing this music that ultimately is
going to appeal to a very narrow margin of music fans is a recipe for
having a bleak and pessimistic view of what you do creatively.”
> These Arms Are Snakes
Mar. 7, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), Brooklyn, 718-486- 5400; 8, $13/15
