Live review: These Arms Are Snakes, Russian Circles and Tropics – Engine Room, 14th November 2008

Last time I had the chance to see These Arms Are Snakes they were in the relatively spruce and spacious surroundings of Southampton’s Joiners Arms. Habitués of that venue would probably be quite shocked by the compact and delightfully seedy seaside bohemia of Brighton’s Engine Room, located just opposite the charred shell of the West Pier and seemingly the natural heir to its ragged glories.

Or they might be more focussed on immediate practicalities, of course. “Does anyone know what runs through that pipe?” asks a member of Tropics mid-way through their set, referring to a white PVC tube embedded in the ceiling which is dripping what everyone sincerely hopes is just cold water onto whoever stands beneath it. But everyone’s crowding forward to watch anyway, and with good reason – because Tropics are rather super.

Eclectic by nature rather than some ill-advised attempt to “be different”, their set ping-pongs between the two extremes of punkish indie prog and progressive indie punk, catching lots of interesting (and largely uninhabited) territories on the way. Everyone gets a turn at adding some vocals to the angular and pacey hooks and solid rhythm section, and their easy attitude toward the crowd, some equipment problems and a lack of monitors marks Tropics out as a decent sort of band who might go far if the wind catches them right. Plus they’ve got a song called “My Boyfriend’s Signed To Virgin Records and He Knows People”; you really can’t ask for much more than that.

Russian Circles are this evening’s odd men out – the only three-piece, and the only band to only play instrumentals. Collectively, they gangle, with an air of seventies burn-out in their looks and their feet surrounded by enough obscure stompboxes to make a shoegazer band jealous. There’s no speaking, no theatre, no showmanship: they set up, and they start playing, wafting out huge thick waves of sound. The only sharp edges come from the drumming; the guitar and bass (and occasional keys) are rounded and blurred by that stockade of pedals, eroded and smoothed like the stones on Brighton beach.

Comparisons to fellow Chicago residents Pelican are not just inevitable but warranted; Russian Circles are descended from the same stock, you might say, and they play an organic and evolving instrumental form of heavy metal that that shares that turn-of-the-back to the jagged tough-guy posturing and hell’n'demons imagery of the more easily marketed (and easily forgotten) outfits. But where Pelican’s music is a journey from earth to sky – a leap from one element into another, a collection of hymns to transcendence – Russian Circles are pure water, pure immersion, like the dark salty ocean that is lapping maybe a few hundred yards behind their backs.

It flows, it ebbs and it seeps… and like the tide, it can sneak up on you sooner than you expect before pulling you off your feet into a sudden and powerful undertow, or sparkle delicately, deceptively calm, waiting for the moon to move again. Russian Circles sound unpredictable and mercurial, but one imagines they only sound that natural as a result of meticulous practice. Their set is like thirty minutes of cinema for your ears, and ends with as little ceremony as it began… all bar the applause, of course.

These Arms Are Snakes place little faith in ceremony, either, but theatre gets a significant amount of stage-time tonight. Last time I saw them play, TAAS were musically intense but physically restrained… at least by comparison. The appropriately named Steve Snere also seems to have emerged from the seventies but, as my companion points out, he looks more like a cross between a redneck and an Abba roadie, there being something ineffably Scandinavian about his rock’n'roll lambchops and moustache. However, Snere’s appearance quickly takes second place to his antics; to be blunt, he’s all over the fucking place.

Half personal exorcism, half ironic-PCP-Elvis-lust-punk-caricature, Snere leaps into the crowd, climbs on backs, climbs on speaker stacks (no mean feat when they reach the admittedly very low ceiling), and clambers over the drums to spend a few minutes flailing around in the open doorway of a storeroom like a man about to engage in glossolalia. It’s a very hardcore show, matching up well to the aggressive new material from Tail Swallower And Dove which features heavily in tonight’s set. And that’s both senses of ‘heavily’.

At the back of my mind is that little voice that keeps saying “it’s just a show, man”, but even it seems a little uncertain of itself in the face of These Arms Are Snakes. Brittle sharp guitar and fat buzzing synths stab and scrape between the slamming of the drumkit, providing the audio rubber for Snere to batter his psychosis against, howling and shrieking into two microphones, doing unspeakable things to the output of one of them with some effects boxes, and mumbling quasi-comprehensible non sequiturs in between songs.

Suddenly everything seems more sinister, from the dripping of the anonymous pipe to the belt twisted round Snere’s neck to the bespectacled guy in the crowd who – like some skinny Rollins – seems to know all the words better than Snere and shouts along with a scrunched-up angry face. It’s as if Snere has infected us with his paranoia, or as if the liquid in the fog machines had something experimental and military added to it before the set. The effects linger long after These Arms Are Snakes have stopped playing, and threaten to leave permanent scars. If nothing else, it’s going to take an impressive band with a damned intense live show to topple tonight’s performance.