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(Oct 30, 2004)
Hot Snakes: Audit In Progress
Rating - ****
& Winner, 2004 Big Lou's Best Rock Band of the Year Award
The Hot Snakes page
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Starting as far back as Led Zeppelin, and repeating itself many more times than I care to remember, many bands have followed the pattern of (1)Rock, (2)Rock, (3)Slow Mushy Crap That We'd Really Rather Not Hear, in that order, over their first three albums. This temporal waltz starts with steps one and two being very promising and third step ending up right in a pile of musical cat droppings that the band didn't dare put on albums one and two because fans were not yet sufficiently enamored with the band to buy such crap.
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With this pattern as background, I am delighted to report that Hot Snakes has NOT! NOT! fallen into the familiar trap. There is a similarity to all three of their CDs to date (in order, Automatic Midnight, Suicide Invoice, and Audit In Progress): all the songs are fast, hard, and energetic throughout. Not most, but all. In fact, it makes you wonder if they have any speed setting other than fast. But who cares? You can always go listen to an old Michael Bolton or James Taylor record if you crave slow music performed by fossilized Jean-Luc Picard wannabes. Rather, we should revel in the very existence of a band that has the stones, the very stones to do all fast, all hard, all the time, now, later and forever. Maybe it's because, as they say on track 4, "(they'd) give up sex for Kreative Kontrol."
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Audit In Progress charges hard out of the gate with the likes of "Braintrust," "Hi-Lites," the song "Audit In Progress," "Hatchet Job," and "Plenty for All." "Hi-Lites" is interesting in that it is a bit of a throwback to their first album's penchant for John Reis' jolting, halting, slightly-offkey vocals such as those in "Salton City" (compared to the smoother, more melodic ones that dominate 2002's Suicide Invoice). Hot Snakes changed drummers with this third release, and new drummer Mario Rubalcaba hits the ground running with a most perplexing 19/8 beat on "Hatchet Job," outdoing the 8:7/8 pattern on "Paid In Cigarettes" (see Big Lou's review of Suicide Invoice, below). It's hard to say which, if any, of the songs from Audit In Progress will become cult classics - my votes would be for "Plenty for All" and the song "Audit In Progress." Their music takes a while to fully appreciate.
After having listened to music from many hundreds of different sources this past year, Hot Snakes get my award for "Big Lou's Best Rock Band of 2004." It's an award without a prize, award ceremony, recognition, come to think of it, without any value whatsoever, but I will only give it once a year, and this year it's to Hot Snakes. You owe it to yourself to rush out and buy all three of their CDs, because if you haven't heard them, you don't know how good rock can still be in this post-post-modern year of 2004.
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