Short bursts of anger snap into place in the dimly lit songs of the Amazing Snakeheads, a Glasgow band enamored with the well-worn fusion of punk and classic rock'n'roll. If punk represented a new year zero for rock to some, for others it carried all the hallmarks of a past worth digging up and fusing with its abrasive form. This is the punk that takes Jerry Lee Lewis as its starting point instead of, say, the Stooges or Suicide. It’s unashamedly backwards-looking, caught somewhere between the precipice gazing of Nick Cave in his Birthday Party days and the plastic Elvis front Jon Spencer took in the Blues Explosion. It wouldn’t work without the robust commitment of singer Dale Barclay, who’s spitting and cursing one minute (“I’m a Vampire”) then lost at the end of his tether over a woman the next (“Heading for Heartbreak”). The whiff of pomade may be palpable, but so is the air of commitment.
There are two distinct parts to Amphetamine Ballads, the four-piece band’s debut album for indie behemoths Domino. The first half is full of Barclay falling to the floor, lying prostrate, kicking against everything around him. By the album’s close, with an actual ballad titled “Tiger By the Tail”, there’s tasteful Spanish guitar and a deep air of surrender. Watching Barclay get there is this album’s greatest asset, setting an overall narrative to a series of songs that would otherwise be struggling for air amid the morass of greasy material by countless other bands in this vein. “Nighttime” is typical of the band’s vigor, with vicious slide guitar riffs overlapping pounding drums and the odd lyrical clunker (“I’m a soul sucker, I’m here to suck your soul”). Barclay’s not the strongest writer, but he overcomes it by throwing everything of himself into the music—on “Swamp Song” he dispenses with words altogether and simply screams, David Yow-style.
Cave’s Birthday Party era is going to be a constant comparison point for the Amazing Snakeheads, but most of the time they appear to be working through various descendents of Cave’s style. “Heading for Heartbreak” works along the same lines as Gallon Drunk’s distinctly North London take on Cave’s blues, recalling their standout track “You Should Be Ashamed”. Elsewhere, the band works in a bubblegum edge on “Here It Comes Again”, mirroring the pop-garage approach of the earliest White Stripes material, while “Flatlining” hurtles toward the MC5 with Barclay at his authoritarian best as he rips shreds out of his vocal cords. The join between the different sides of the band isn't easily glued together—when they stretch out into the seven-minute “Every Guy Wants to Be Her Baby” it feels like momentum gained has suddenly been lost, especially as nothing strong enough happens to sustain its runtime.
If the Amazing Snakeheads sound like a drunk stumbling around looking for the next bar at the close of this album, it’s at least an appropriate way for them to operate. This is music cast in the after hours world inhabited by the characters of Tom DiCillo’s Johnny Suede or Jim Jarmusch’s group of Memphis drunks from Mystery Train, if not quite (yet) breathing the same air of total fatalism as Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night. Amphetamine Ballads doesn’t come bearing a fully formed vision of a band, carving out insight with switchblades right from the start. At its worst, you can at least hear where Barclay is yearning to get to—that transient place where acrimony collides into reflection then rebounds back again. There are a handful of moments here when he turns himself inside-out over the course of a song, bringing him into the orbit of those artists he so obviously idolizes. Now he just needs to figure out how to emulate his starting position.
