Snail
Blood
This one took the hard road | Meteor City
The path to a unique “stoner” sound is a long and winding road. Like the journey to Ithaca or a handful of mushrooms, the prize is in the trip. A popular path to crushing heaviness is to travel with company and rip off a Matt Pike project. Another famous shortcut is to endlessly jam on three riffs that never amount to Dopethrone.
Snail are not interested in shortcuts or pussy-footing. You don’t get nothing for free, and this one took the long way. Snail formed in ’92, back when Kyuss still had the blues and Sleep were still scaling the mountain. Their comically belated sophomore album, Blood, slovenly plods through gravity-altering sludge and weightless psych, with a taste for alternative that’s refreshing.
The opener, “Mental Models,” offers nothing but the porch treatment. Then the second cut, “Sleep,” sounds like Smashing Pumpkins drowning, suffering and still rocking. “Via/Penny Dreadful” forces flashbacks to the dissonant grooves of the almighty Soundgarden. Fuck Chris Cornell, hard, but Snail’s Badstonerfinger has a nice touch. Tracks like “Relief” and “Backlight” offer light, smoky respites from the sludge that wafts through the air like unwritten Monster Magnet jams. All the while, Snail’s noise-warped solos, as in “Not for Me,” burn off the juices in your brain. A good feeling.
The path to a unique stoner sound is littered with seeds and stems, sick tones and thick riffs—and in this case, with cavernous clean vocals and catchy choruses. In 2009, Blood is an enjoyable departure from the social norms and mores of heaviness.
—Frank Lemke