Snail-Blood

Meter City
2009


Snail formed back in the early 90s as a trio and pumped out a self-titled album and an EP called "All Channels Are Open". Then they began writing material for their second album, but lack of success and other issues caused the band to break up. Last year the guys got back together and revived the band name. Then they added a long time friend, Eric Clausen (guitar) as a fourth member to add to their sound. Then they were ready to finally knock out their sophomore LP and "Blood" is made up of mostly songs that were originally written back in the 90's. So that brings everything up to date. So if a band is called Snail then ou would expect them to be slow and indeed this band lives up to their name. They churn out large mountains of riffs in attempt to create an atmosphere right from the start. I would say that the sound is more thick than heavy as the sound tends to float more than pound at your senses. The sound is a cross between Fireball Ministry, "Holy Mountain" era Sleep and a few others. Where this bands succeeds is that they take some of the same influences as other stoner acts, but they try to be more subtle in their presentation and even stretch the sound out some more. This gives their sound some definite texture. The downside to Snail's sound is they really could have used some kick to the head type bursts. There were songs that had a hypnotizing effect, but others that were beginning to put me to sleep. I like their approach to an extent, but would have enjoyed more if they would varied the sound more and added some punch to it. Still not bad for a band who have not recorded in a long time.