These Arms Are Snakes was not the gut wrenching or tendril slanging I had anticipated when stepping into yet another steamy Northern Liberty's venue, this one surrounded by abandoned, condemned, or otherwise empty buildings. No wait—I've left out an essential detail. “These Arms Are Snakes” is probably the best band name I've ever heard.
Can I call them rag-tag without dirty sideways looks in my direction? Brian Cook (bass) and Ryan Frederiksen (guitar and Danish (i.e. metal) last name) fit my frame of prog/hardcore/post-hardcore/noise guys in plaid patterns and a dark beard (Cook), arms tucked into barbed wire tats (Frederiksen), serious and grim facial expressions (both). Chris Common sat behind the drums looking like maybe he sat next to you in a sociology class junior year, except that he was pouring sweat and flailing his arms and panting. Steve Snere looked like Ringo Starr circa Yellow Submarine, and when someone yelled, “You look English,” at him from the front row of this zipper-hoodied mass, I felt right and good and justified.
During the first song, Snere falls into the crowd, Italian boots flailing, and they hoist him up to the ceiling, where he screams at the microphone and tears at a ceiling fan. The dust collected at the edges twists and drifts around through the changing lights, and the crowd dumps him back on the stage. The show continues like this: Common, Cook, and Frederiksen focus intently on the harsh, syncopated rhythms, tweaking high strings in arpeggio-like progressions, dropping the down beat an eighth-note ahead or behind where it had been the previous measure, and Ringo Snere pumps and thrusts his hips around the little stage, jacks off the microphone, unbuttons his shirt and twists his own nipples for a camera before belly flopping into the crowd like a toddler into a pool. The arms come up like tentacles to shake at a particularly appealing riff or to push Snere up to the ceiling again so he can latch onto the light rack, which I was certain wouldn't hold his weight.
Snere had the manic presence to make up for Cook and Frederiksen's focus, which didn't have much stage appeal. However, the pair, along with Common's math beats, embodied a technique and energy that crunched against the walls of that little room and sounded like some awful mechanism. Then Snere would take over a keyboard and scream or vocode, twisting knobs and dials, grinding the eardrums down, deafening the cretins directly in front of the PA, giving life and voice to the terrible machine. And once again, he's back into the crowd, and he can't stay off the light rack. He's working hard enough for the whole band, blasting chin-ups next to the Par-38's and 56's in between howling and chanting vocals.
Through all of this, I'm not sure if any of the rest of the band has even moved. I look around the crowd, to see short hair and long hair shaking and bobbing, a general assortment of Levi's straight legs and Converse. One guy next to me is doing some kind of spazz dance, his knees and shoulders and wrists in paroxysms—just like the videos from the 60's of the one guy dancing in a crowd of people too stoned to stand.
Then it seems like they've tired out, of energy in general and of their sound, because while no one else has moved, except for the occasional drummer shuffle, Snere has climbed atop the Marshall bass stack stage right, writhing and undulating, draping himself in the red crinoline curtains. Frederiksen launched into a guitar solo, a weird twist of Omar Rodriquez's use of delay and scales from the Volta years. Math beats abounded, proving that, if nothing else, These Arms Are Snakes has learned to count. I wondered which extremity of the beast was responsible for the manic fluctuations from 5/8 to 5/4 to 9/8; I wanted to assume drummers were responsible for overly convoluting what could be simple grooving rhythms, but who knows? I could probably blame Snere, who took every liberty in letting the crowd fill in vocals for him while he pounced into their willing hands.
The crowd was desperate to interact, haggling and trying to tell jokes, but butchering the punch lines. Maybe The Barbary welcomes this sort of behavior, bad jokes and crowd interaction both. Maybe Darker My Love set the audience up for this before I arrived. I just couldn't be sure. But they were not drunk. I looked around toward the end of the show and realized there was not a beer to be drunk or spilled in the crowd. Cook had one on stage, unless it was a tasty Topo Chico or Jarrito or some other such recognizably Mexican soda. This crowd was anxious and aggressive and sober: straight edge?
Through arpeggio-like tapping and lyrics that aren't singing, but aren't yelling either, something like Me Without You and all of it wildly distorted, I became unable to tell songs apart. None of them were immediately or discernibly different, unless they relied on lyrical content for differentiation, in which case I didn't stand a chance, Snere as likely to grin or spit as he was to “sing.” Did they dedicate a song to John McCain? Maybe. I am sure, however, that Cook put the bass guitar down to play a synth bass line rife with short decay and scratchy like late 90's club music. The crowd sucked it down. The first four rows and a few pockets further thrashed about and jiggled violently. Was that the second to last song? I wasn't sure, because before it seemed like even twenty minutes had passed, Snere was thanking everyone and apologizing for being done, saying how much he liked Philly. An hour had passed, and there I was in the crowd wondering what had just happened, totally disoriented like after a Jodorowsky film. I didn't go away understanding anything new about music or any strange post-movement or the human condition, but I saw something happen on stage that I'm not entirely ready to classify.
