You don't need to have heard a note of music by, or indeed know anything about, The Amazing Snakeheads to work out what their debut album might sound like. You can get a good idea just by reading the tracklist. There, a cavalcade of death, violence and darkness awaits: I'm a Vampire is followed by Nighttime, Flatlining and the winningly titled Where Is My Knife? Likewise, you don't have to be an expert in the semiotics of rock to realise that songs called things like that are perhaps less likely to bear close resemblance to the oeuvres of Bastille or Eliza Doolittle than they are, say, the diseased-sounding gothic blues-rock of the Birthday Party. And so it proves. The first sounds you hear on Amphetamine Ballads are the crash of a gong, a piercingly distorted flailing guitar, a lumbering bass riff, followed by an anguished, thickly Glaswegian-accented voice screaming about how an unrequited love makes the owner of said voice feel like the undead.
The trio famously refuse to discuss their musical influences in interviews, but in fairness, they don't really need to. They exist in an occult lineage of dark guitar bands from Glasgow, most of whom made no real impact outside of Scotland – their most immediate antecedents being a quintet called Uncle John and Whitelock, who ploughed what must have been a very lonely furrow of bleak, frenzied music and performance art-influenced live shows at the height of landfill indie in the early noughties – and moreover, on the evidence of Amphetamine Ballads, their debt to Nick Cave's old mob is pretty clear. You can hear their echoes when the music's atmosphere suddenly heaves from an ominous rumble of drums and two-note bassline to all-out howling chaos; in the ramshackle, lurching swing rhythms that underpin Where Is My Knife? and Nighttime, and in the troubling lyrical equations of sex with violence. However, there's far more on offer here than just homage. For one thing, frontman Dale Barclay's lyrics replace Cave's drugged-out phantasmagorias with something noticeably more sensitive to real life, which gives their music a different power. There's also evidence of more esoteric listening on the part of the band, and intimations of different directions they might take in the future. The closing acoustic Tiger By the Tail is startlingly delicate, given what's preceded it; Memories is powered by saxophone to genuinely impressive effect; Here It Comes Again has a taut, motoric pulse at its heart.
The other obvious comparison Amphetamine Ballads provokes is with Fat White Family. The Amazing Snakeheads don't sound much like them, but the wilful scuzziness of both bands seems like a reaction to the increasing glossiness of alternative rock: certainly, you'll search Amphetamine Ballads in vain for any hint of an 80s-AOR inspired synth sound, a soft-rock influence, a knowing nod in the direction of contemporary R&B or any other currently hip "indie" signifier. That said, the Amazing Snakeheads are clearly a more stylized proposition than the Brixton collective. For all the visceral power of their live shows, it's pretty obvious that Dale Barclay's on-stage persona is a slightly knowing one that plays on the archetype of the sociopathic Scottish hard man, an eternal, pervasive folk devil that's fuelled everything from the novels of Irvine Welsh and Christopher Brookmyre to the character of Vyvian's pet hamster in The Young Ones. In fact, the genuine fear he seems to have instilled in a selection of live reviewers notwithstanding, Barclay's real skill may lie not in how successfully he manipulates that image on stage, but in capturing some of its power in the studio. On record, it's hard to project the kind of intensity that Barclay is after without slipping into sounding faintly preposterous, but on Amphetamine Ballads, he pulls it off. He has a way of offering to take you out dancing that makes it sound as if it would be an experience only marginally preferable to having your head repeatedly slammed in a car door: at one point, he howls "forget the rest, I'm your daddy", and the effect is skin-crawling.
Listening to Amphetamine Ballads, you get the feeling that the Amazing Snakeheads know they've struck on something powerful. For all the album's angst, there's a confidence on display: a band has to feel fairly bullish about its abilities to strip a song down as dramatically as they do on Here It Comes Again, which is basically nothing more than the title, screamed over and over again for three and a half minutes. Their confidence isn't misplaced. It's not the easiest listen in the world, but it's not supposed to be: at a time when most of what passes for alternative rock sounds desiccated, Amphetamine Ballads feels raw and potent and alive.
