How long should an artist wait between full-length releases? Should prolificacy be an unconditionally celebrated trait, or should some consideration be paid to audience fatigue? I don't have any hard statistics on this, but I'd guess that the average wait between any two full-length releases is about a year and a half. It's a long enough period of time to allow one album's hype to grow and fade out, and give the fans a bit of a breather before having something new foisted on them. It's also probably beneficial to the artist, since it gives them some time to fully develop ideas and visions for the next album. I mention this because Bring on the Snakes has come along only thirteen months after the release of Crooked Fingers' eponymous debut, which has yet to leave my stereo's heavy rotation. And regardless of a desire to be fair toward it, the album still feels like afterbirth of its predecessor, a shrugged-shouldered sophomore slump.
Eric Bachmann, the main creative force behind Crooked Fingers, has a proven track record of continuing musical experimentation; as part of the Archers of Loaf and Barry Black, he attempted to develop a different facet of his sound on each album. He certainly wasn't always successful, but there's something to be said for the effort. The first Crooked Fingers album, an outgrowth of Barry Black's expanded arrangements, combined with further refinements of Bachmann's curmudgeonly lyrical outlook, was just varied enough to avoid criticism of being repetitive. But Bachmann was clearly treading on thin ice, and with Bring on the Snakes, he falls right through.
The saving grace of Crooked Fingers was the small group of friends Bachmann assembled for recording, who provided much-needed instrumental variation between songs. On Bring on the Snakes, however, Bachmann goes it alone, sticking with a steady stream of fingerpicked guitar, droning tones, and sparse percussion. Less interesting arrangements combined with less focused lyrics turn the album into one long, generic Crooked Fingers track, laying bare the slightness of Bachmann's songwriting formula.
To be fair, there are some minor differences between the two Crooked Fingers albums, but they're far outweighed by the similarities. "The Rotting Strip" clatters along with Magnetic Fields-like toy-synth noise, and near-optimistic lyrics, a first for Bachmann: "[We] crossed our hearts half-hoping/ That we could both quit smoking/ And kick the booze and blow/ And one day go make something of ourselves." His characters-- usually broken-down, self-destructive drunks haunted by devils and lost in crowds of strangers-- have started to think that there may be a way out of their hopeless lives after all; but it's really only a minor development that gets folded into the larger lyrical picture, which is still rife with decay and decimation to the point of tedium.
So while Bachmann's lyrical ideas and melodies creep forward ever so slightly, the only thing to take solace in is the occasional odd atmospheric noise or unintentional musical reference. The fingerpicking on "Devil's Train" strongly recalls Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing; "Doctors of Deliverance" is propelled by an oddly clean electronic pulse; and the title track features the subtle ticking of a clock, or perhaps the clip-clop of a horse's hooves, to keep time. When it comes down to it, though, Bring on the Snakes remains Eric Bachmann's first album that doesn't exhibit a significant musical development. Had more time been allotted to experiment with other techniques, or even to just develop the songs, it's conceivable that something better might have come out of it. I guess we'll never know.
