Monday 13 March 2017

Super Snake - Leap Of Love (Album Review)


Release date: February 14th 2017. Label: Self Released. Format: CD/DD

Leap Of Love – Tracklisting

1.Leap of Love 07:20
2.Lie4U 05:30
3.Hot Pavement 05:23
4.Spirit Cave 07:36
5.Lavish Sum of Dread 03:30
6.Sister Margaret 05:52
7.Dreamcoated 04:38
8.Too Late Who Cares 04:41
9.Get Lost, Be Mine 06:14
10.Cecilia 02:36
11.Big Seize 04:04
12.Take My Breath 06:39

Band Members

Pete August: Guitar
Vinnie Fiore: Drums
Jerry Jones: Vocals
Joe Laga: Guitar
Jesse Marianni: Bass, Keys

Review

New Jersey's Super Snake play an almighty mixture of riff fuelled psychedelic rock laden with hazy elements of shoegaze, noise, doom and stoner rock resulting in a beautiful melting pot of ideas, sounds and styles that really pays off. The band (formed by vocalist Jerry Jones of NJ powerhouses Trophy Scars) have created a sound that will consume you with its epic nature while retaining a catchy and accessible nature to it with songs that will be stuck in your head for an age.

The Super Snake experience starts on this album with the albums title track, a song on which a dreamlike feel encases your mind while the riffs on show will demolish it and this dynamic is one that the band focusses on throughout Leap Of Love, it's an intoxicating mixture that will capture your imagination thoroughly.

Lie4U carries on this sweeping start while Hot Pavement ups the energy with its confident swaggering sound with Jones powerful vocals taking centre stage on this brushing stomp. There are also sprawling songs on Leap Of Love, especially the expansive Spirit Cave, a song that takes in many twists and turns and is never anything other than fully immersive in its scope and execution and the differences in sounds all come together magnificently.

Lavish Sum Of Dread is an apt title and the song sounds exactly like its intention in sonic form while songs like Sister Margaret, Too Late Who Cares and Get Lost, Be Mine are strutting anthems that sound like focussed jams that Kyuss would have been proud of. Even the more understated and mellow songs in the album like Cecilia evoke a passionate reaction from the band. The album ends with the urgent vibrancy of the huge sounding Big Seize and as the anthemic and dreamlike Take My Breath finishes things off, you are left under no illusion that you have just been listening to sheer brilliance.

One thing that strikes you more and more when listening to the album is the bands majestic use of keyboards which enhances the sound even more (especially on Spirit Cave) and makes the psychedelic elements really stand out and take centre stage, something the noise rock element does as well, in fact the whole melding of everything sounds immense and makes the music of Super Snake as special as it is . The production on the album (by the band along with Dillinger Escape Plan's Kevin Antressian) is superb and the songs explode out of the speakers with a vibrant lust for life.

This is a collection of epic songs that owe as much to bands like Swans, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive as it does to Sabbath and the Melvins and if you throw in the Stooges, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Monster Magnet and Butthole Surfers too, you can get a pretty good idea of what Leap Of Love sounds like, and above all it sounds absolutely amazing. Super Snake have crafted a genuinely impressive and vibrant album in Leap Of Love, one that is a joy to listen to and will be for so long to come.

Words by Gavin Brown