Prior to listening to Bright Flashes I’d never actually sat down and checked out Snapcase and to be honest I was expecting yet another lamely pretentious Victory band but just as with Between The Buried And Me, I was quite surprised. Being a collection of rare tracks and covers I can’t really judge whether or not this is indicative of Snapcase‘s sound and infuriatingly enough the band switch from pounding, driving anthemic tracks to dully monotonous ones.
Take ‘Dress Rehearsal’ and ‘Skeptic’ for example. Both are riff-based, with Jon Salemi and Frank Vicario’s guitars pushing the song along at a good rate while Ben Lythberg thrashes out a heavy-as-fuck rhythm on drums. They’re both well-balanced tracks that have an inexorable momentum and it seems like Snapcase are fully settled in their sound, like a heavier Rival Schools or maybe even Hundred Reasons. Their version of Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Mountain Song’ does just sound like JA played a bit louder, because Daryl Taberski’s vocals do actually remind me of Perry Farrell’s due to their high pitch and the fact that Taberski just shouts instead of the dull screaming that most bands seem to be trying out these days.
But then on ‘Ten AM’ they introduce a load of trippy effects and they go rapidly downhill as the supposedly electronic direction of the song is swallowed amidst the repetition of about four different (yet equally boring) synthetic riffs. It’s astoundingly dull, since it has hardly any discernible bass to pin it down and comes off as an indulgent reworking with no power or conviction. Their cover of ‘Blacktop’ also bores and annoys, with the constant repeating of the same sludgy riff before the song just burns itself out due to a complete lack of direction. It’s not as if I demand a cogent or strict structure in the songs I like – I cite The Locust in my defence of this – but I fully believe that lazy songs like this should be left to the garage ‘punk’ bands.
Like I said, I don’t know a huge amount of Snapcase‘s material, and seeing as this isn’t an album of new material it doesn’t seem right to condemn them wholly. They brood on the dullest parts of their songs and phone in the parts that could elevate them to greatness – the melodic bridge in ‘Blacktop’ is just thrown away! Check out That Fateful Day or Rival Schools if you like them but as an album on its own this doesn’t cut the mustard.
Ben