Holy Serpent
Endless
Riding Easy
This album gives a flash back to my late teen years. It takes me back to riding around in Ed’s car, cruising the beach at the state park, scoping out the pretty girls but being too shy to say anything. So instead, we’d just turn up the music louder, as if that would magically attract the ladies. It never did. We’d be pretty much left staring at album covers like the one for Holy Serpent’s latest release and imagining running into hot foxes like the ones on the cover who would be into shy macho guys cranking heavy metal. Yeah, we were living in Wayne’s World back then.
Holy Serpent are a quartet of psychedelic soul surfers from Melbourne, Australia. Their modus operation is slow, slogging riffs forming a dense protective shell around their trippy songs. The heavy wall of guitar and bass feels like keep of a medieval castle: thick, strong and imposing. There is another world behind those walls. There are melodies hiding back there. There are stories being woven that I think are sort of mythological hallucinations. On “Lord Deceptor,” there is an ethereal choir lurking back there. To be fair, I haven’t been drawn to this sort of heavy riffage in a long time, but I know it has its place. Somewhere on a lonesome back road, there are some young dudes nodding their heads to the ominous sonic sludge, hoping that they’ll run into those girls on the album cover somewhere around the next bend in the road.
