SNAKES SAY HISSS! – s/t (Famous Class)
Posted: November 29th, 2006, by Maxwell WilliamsI couldn’t figure it out, and the music nerd inside me was taunting my lack of recall. We nerds are supposed to be able to sniff out a Memphis Minnie cover or an Ennio Morricone sample from a mile out. It was driving me nuts. I passed the CD over my cubicle to my co-worker.
“What does this sound like… Something ’80s, right?”
He put his headphones on. He agreed with me that it was something ’80s “or something.” I listened again and then called over another co-worker. A few hours (and a 2am phone call to the obligatory ’80s dance music aficionado friend) later we had deduced that the melody to the 7th track on Snakes Say Hisss!’s self-titled debut record sounded like the chorus to Taylor Dayne’s dance pop mega-hit “Tell It To My Heart.”
The point is, Snakes Say Hisss! essentially make dance pop in the vein of Taylor Dayne if she used filthy big synth loops and glitched out drum machines and sang mawkish near-emo Pavement-isms. And were underproduced. And, well… okay the Taylor Dayne comparison is a stretch. But that one song sort of sounds like her. I swear.
Bonus: Snakes Say Hisss! comes lovingly packaged in a beautiful screen-printed zine.
Double Bonus: They hail from the remote little village of Potsdam, New York, a town whose ice hockey team we beat the snot out of every time we played them.
-Maxwell Williams
