Album Review: Bushfire, Snakes Bite Tales
You could sit for a week and get no further than the title. Snakes Bite Tales. Call it ‘grammatical depth.’ If it was ‘Snake Bite Tales’ or ‘Snakes Bite Tails,’ that would be one thing. Snakes Bite Tales refuses not to be both. That petulance is part of its charm. Think of snakes eating multiple stories. As with the cover art, there’s an ouroboros aspect, snakes biting their own tails — I also read snakes biting tails as a warning or a motivation; “better haul ass, you know snakes bite tails”; a way of saying keep moving — and there’s ‘tales’ to imply that the songs themselves are the stories of these self-inflicted bites, which it very much turns out is the case across the nine songs/42 minutes of the fifth Bushfire LP and first since 2017’s When Darkness Comes (review here). The Darmstadt, Germany, five-piece have been around long enough to name their regrets, but with actual-maturity comes the ability to call a thing what it is and move forward (or so I’m told), and with a succession of relatively short, catchy tracks informed by Southern heavy with a burl that’s received as many bruises as it’s dished out, forward momentum is definitely a factor here.
I’ll not feign impartiality on the subject, as I’ve come to consider Bushfire frontman Bill Brown a good friend over the years, and it was with particular joy that I got to see Bushfire play twice at this year’s Freak Valley Festival (review here), playing this album in full between two sets. The setting is relevant because Snakes Bite Tales, in addition to welcoming back bassist Nicolas Kurz to the fold alongside Bill — normally I’d use someone’s last name here, but it feels wrong; this is another way I know I’m not impartial — guitarists Miguel Pereira and Luis Jacobi and drummer Sascha Holz, features near its finish the song “Valley of the Freak,” which is an ode to the fest in question begun with the if-you’ve-been-there-recognizable voice of Volker Fröhmer greeting the crowd with “Liebe freunde!” before the riff kicks in. While right in line with the traditions of the kind of boozy Southern heavy they play, the heart-on-sleeve aspects of “Valley of the Freak” nonetheless come through as sincere, and knowing Bill as I do, I’ll tell you he means it when he talks about finding his place between those hillsides.
If that’s momentum and passion working on Bushfire‘s side, they’re not alone in terms of appeals. “Cult of Conformity” opens with a rasp and a roll, a tight structure and a loose groove, starting the procession through “Force of 1,000 Suns” — slower, chuggier, but still moving — and barreling into “Dead Man’s Hand,” the Motörheady skid of the guitars feeling anything but coincidental. There’s strut in the final slowdown there, vibrant, classic and dirty in kind, that feels particularly Pepper Keenan-esque, but with the raspy shouts over top and the smooth-nodder cymbal crash behind, the feel is a push but not overblown. There’s a lot of record left, after all. “Self-Inflicted Bite” cleans up the vocals momentarily before unveiling more of a bellow atop the driving early verse, a howling midsection solo, and a grungier delve later that prefaces some of the moodier/darker fare to come toward the end of the album — the tail end, specifically — without departing the raw-with-purpose sound fostered by the surrounding tracks. At this point, Bushfire are four songs deep and about to hit into the centerpiece highlight, “Comfort in Silence,” which ends side A of the vinyl and bridges to “Under the Willow Tree,” the longest inclusion at 5:43.
The side B leadoff brings a departure in terms of arrangement, diving further into the Southern side with lap steel and a brooding vocal in the first half, only to break out in the second, volume and distortion taking hold fluidly without sacrificing the emotional crux of the lyrics. It stands to reason that “Watch You Drown,” which follows, would be the hardest hitting inclusion on the record, or close enough to it to make the point — which is to say I haven’t gotten out the ‘how heavy is it’ ruler and measured. A comparative intensity of riff feels like it’s picking up the forward crux of the songs’ structures and adding to the shove, and this sets up a back-and-forth in tempo as the slowdown becomes a hook unto itself, complementing “Under the Willow Tree”‘s branched-out vibe with a drop-everything, down-to-business feel that still manages to hone a sense of dynamic. Some of the grunge of “Self-Inflicted Bite” is echoed toward the end of “Watch You Drown,” and with “Valley of the Freak” after, Snakes Bite Tales holds some of its most memorable stretches in reserve not for the up-front rockers “Cult of Conformity” or “Force of 1,000 Suns” at the start of the record, but for the later reaches, where “Under the Willow Tree,” “Watch You Drown,” “Valley of the Freak” and “InTerrorGate” each give a distinct look at a side of what Bushfire does.
As the last of those, “InTerrorGate” is the darkest and most aggressive, and it stands out from the tracklisting before that. Given the raw, from-the-guts love exuded by “Valley of the Freak” just prior, the closer feels like a stark turn that, although it’s nastier in terms of the execution, pulls back on the emotional impact and so feels somewhat superfluous in terms of the full-album flow. That is, with that succession of three songs on side B, Bushfire are pushing toward the culmination of “Valley of the Freak,” that very-definite declaring of self. “InTerrorGate,” which comes through as less personal and more ‘about a thing’ than speaking right to it in the way of the ode preceding. My sense in listening is it’s there because the band felt it needed to be, and there are a few different levels on which that might be true eight years after the record before it, more than 20 since they started out, among them documentation and preservation. You never know when it’s going to be your last album; so yeah, “InTerrorGate” has something to offer. If Snakes Bite Tales ends up being Bushfire‘s swansong or it doesn’t, in their songwriting and the fervency of its expression — let alone the hours spent analyzing the title — you could only call it representative. This is who Bushfire are.
