These Arms Are Snakes (Isn’t Necessarily Back)
Sometime last month, I was sent a news article about Seattle post-hardcore band These Arms Are Snakes releasing a new record. The band broke up in early 2009, so it’s been a long time. As a devout fan since their first EP, I was, just a little excited. They did some shows last year and it was obvious, people still care.
What they did was truly challenging, combining elements of hardcore, noise, metal and the almighty Ink and Dagger in a blender. The result was caustic, cathartic, and a direct connection between their contemporary selves and a mid ’90s scene that had burned out and disappeared. And right when you thought you had them figured out, they’d release a song like “Ethric Double” that challenged everything they had become. They never rested, period. They were constantly on the road, but suffered setback after setback (hence the above nod to duct tape) along the way before imploding. Bass player Brian Cook joined Russian Circles, vocalist Steve Snere joined the short-lived Crypts, guitarist Ryan Fredriksen started Dust Moth and drummer Chris Common moved to El Paso to open a recording studio.
Life happened. And the collective members of the band didn’t look back to reminisce. But they came at a unique time in underground music and disappeared before being in a band required a full-time developer to populate streaming channels and upload new versions of songs to YouTube. In just a decade, with our attention being pulled in a new direction every eight seconds, it became increasingly easier to forget about tangible media that influenced us right before everything changed. Their final album was one of the last CDs I ordered by mail.
In the years since, Russian Circles gained momentum and allowed Brian Cook to stay on the road and write new material with the band. They’ve put out four records in the past decade, and Cook also released an incredible, hard to box in solo record last summer under the moniker Torment and Glory. (In addition to playing and writing in Sumac)
Fredriksen’s Dust Moth, meanwhile, released two full-length albums that helped define what the band calls “heavy gaze.” They are loud, atmospheric and spatial, (and about to open for Girls Against Boys, another hard to box in band from the ‘90s.)
Over the past few months, I find myself returning to both Torment and Glory and Dust Moth quite often. Though they’re far from the same projects, the lineage they share blew my mind often. So when I read the news about Suicide Squeeze releasing a new TAAS record, I was a little excited.
It’s not entirely new songs. It’s singles, demos and B-sides that are out there, scattered randomly but also possibly out of print, now collected in one place for devout TAAS fans, such as myself. It’s also the band acknowledging their shared past, which they haven’t done on a record since before Instagram was a thing.
Essentially, it’s a window connecting These Arms Are Snakes from 2009 to 2022. At this point, they’ve been broken up longer than they were a band, and while I love the various routes that the members of the band took, I also appreciate that they’re finally taking a look back to acknowledge their shared history.
In 2006, on the final Jade Tree album “Easter,” the band ended the album with a prediction of sorts for an eventual band reckoning. And it said: “There’s an audience, and someone will remember this. As my vision pitchshifts from this whole scene.”
Even then, they seemed destined to outgrow the band and move in different directions. But obviously, they were ahead of their time. And the fans still care.
Buy the new record here.
