King Snake Roost - The rattlesnakes of garage-noise

A tiny town in New South Wales (237 inhabitants scattered across 7 square kilometres of land), Grong Grong looks, from above, like a ghost town, the victim of some recent nuclear blast. And yet, in this place forgotten by God, a post office had already opened on November 1, 1881. Clearly the locals had plenty to talk about, and the letters must have piled up fast. As it happens, the term - of Aboriginal origin - also denotes a particularly poor spot to camp, which must have sounded just as "poor" to the ears of respectable society as the music made by guitarist Charles Tolnay and his bandmates (namely Dave Taskas on bass, George Klestinis on drums and Michael Farkas on vocals, sax and synthesizer), who, despite living in Adelaide, chose that very name to christen their band. Luckily, trying to liven up the scene down there on the southern coast, alongside Doug Thomas (owner of Greasy Pop Records), was one Harry Butler, who from October '79 had been busy producing and distributing the Dna fanzine, initially focused on the punk world and later able to keep close tabs on the entire Australian underground scene. Adelaide was home to bands of varying interest, such as Exploding White Mice, Mad Turks From Istanbul, The Spikes, July the 14th, Bloodloss and, of course, Grong Grong.

Inspired by the raw, feral sound of the Birthday Party, but also mindful of the lesson taught by Cramps, Flipper and Pere Ubu, in 1985 they recorded, for Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles, a self-titled Ep - still not entirely distinctive - featuring one side recorded in the studio and one live, taken from a show at Melbourne's Seaview Ballroom. Farkas recalls: "We met Jello at a gig where we opened for the Dead Kennedys. We finished playing and Jello came up on stage while we were packing up our gear. He told us: 'I love you guys! You're the best band I've seen since I ran into the Butthole Surfers in Texas. Would you like to make a record with us?'" Then Farkas overdosed and fell into a coma for nine months, forcing the band to call it quits.

An ugly affair that, as often happens, turned out (no offence to good old Farkas!) to be a stroke of luck, since Tolnay, incapable of sitting idle, soon after launched the King Snake Roost adventure together with Peter Hill (vocals), Michael Raymond (bass) and Bill Bostle (drums). Further radicalising the Birthday Party blueprint that had been the backbone of Grong Grong, King Snake Roost became the architects of one of the most savage, smoking and, at the same time, innovative sounds of the Eighties. Just as the band led by the very young Nick Cave had taught, punk's energy was reshaped through a warped, grotesque approach, stirring together blues, evolved hard rock, proto-grunge and traces of jazz into an inextricable, infernal heap of dissonance, detuned strings, jagged rhythms and vocal blasphemy.

Like many American bands intent on twisting hardcore into something psychologically sacrilegious and intellectual (think, for instance, of the work of Saccharine Trust, Laughing Hyenas, Killdozer and Cows), Tolnay and his bandmates tore through the veil of hypocrisy that seemed to cloak so much "rebel" music, proving that rage and ferocity - hardly the "natural" offspring of speed and anarchist posturing - are above all the result of a sonic apotheosis, at once primitive and arty, of a rock music that has stared its cruellest fate straight in the face.

The relationship between the band and their native Adelaide was always a love-hate affair. In the "city of churches", opportunities to play and get noticed were genuinely scarce. Worn down by this situation, the band eventually relocated to the more lush and lively Sydney, on the east coast. There, at the start of the decade, Bruce Griffiths, buzzing with excitement over news from the UK about the punk revolution and the rise of fanzines, had founded in 1983, in quick succession, his own magazine (Trousers in Action) and Aberrant Records, which would go on to become one of the most important independent labels in Australian rock, if not the most important of all.

Naturally, Bruce was the right man in the right place. Once in Sydney, King Snake Roost lost no time, and after a handful of small gigs, found themselves... ahem... talking business with the long-haired Bruce. He'd had the chance to hear a couple of their tracks and, fired up, told the band point blank: "If you don't let me put this stuff out, I'll kill you!". Naturally, Tolnay and co. were rather fond of their own skin, and so in 1987 they found themselves on the racks with a 7" single, Top End Killer (the title referenced a serial killer who was, at the time, terrorizing the north of the country), which served up a surly, hard-hitting (post-)punk that was effective but not yet truly original.

Preceded by the 7" Raw Cuts, that same year brought the debut album From Barbarism To Christian Manhood (8 tracks, 34'17"), recorded under the technical supervision of Dave Boyne (guitarist, in the Sixties, of the legendary Missing Links, probably the most famous garage-rockers in the land of kangaroos) at Sydney's Sound Barrier Studios over the Easter holidays. The essential reference point is, once again, the Birthday Party, though compared to the Melbourne outfit there's a far more pronounced garage-rock approach at play. Not yet fully up to the task, this record shows a band searching for its true path, even though the key pillars of its sound are already taking shape: Tolnay's devilish, jazz-inflected guitar, Bostle's solid, incisive drumming, and Hill's lycanthropic voice, somewhere between Beefheart and Waits. What's ultimately missing is the bite of the songs themselves, still a touch stiff here, not yet given over to the sulphurous, disorienting experimentalism that would secure the band's place in history — albeit the history of rock's deepest underground.

The band kicks off right away with "King Snake Roost", a blues viciously roughed up by unhinged spasms, hopping between a sharp, prominent bass and a tireless, garrulous guitar. "Dead All Over" douses the "birthday party" in the murky waters of an angular funk, before letting "Lonely Hearts Club" roast all the guests under the blinding desert sun. The impression is of musicians who, having digested most of the more interesting homegrown musical ideas around them, also possess a taste for the grotesque that drives them to disguise their real intentions beneath a cascade of obsessive repetitions and disorderly piles of sonic aberrations. "Buffalo Bob (The Farmers Land)" turns out to be an ugly, vulgar pow-wow, "Godzilla" takes on almost industrial cadences, "Fat City" speaks the language of a tribal boogie, while "Medusa's Leer" unspools a bluesy instrumental like a ritual, with subliminal exhalations of harmonica. Picking up from the deafening, solemn garage sound of Feedtime, "Napalm Factory" offers up, for its part, a few "progressive" notions, prompted by itches of destructuring and imbalance that, truth be told, remain confined within a fairly tight perimeter.

Also released in 1987 were the split releases More Than 1 Bob (King Snake Roost cover Feedtime's "More Than Love", while the latter take on our heroes' "Buffalo Bob") and School's Out/Nutbush City Limits, alongside Bloodloss (with cover versions of songs by, respectively, Alice Cooper and Ike & Tina Turner); the band then went into the studio to record their greatest album.

The leap in quality marked by Things That Play Themselves (1988; 12 tracks, 40'30") is nothing short of staggering. Having replaced Raymond with David Quinn (formerly of art-rockers Madroom), the band shed its reverential hang-ups and finally unleashed a unity of purpose and white-hot vision that spills over into a series of savage, boldly innovative tracks. According to Tolnay, the real problem with their first record had been Raymond, "a dead weight, capable of stifling the band's creativity". His square, obsessive bass lines had indeed kept their experimental impulses tethered to all-too-familiar ground.

Composed by eight hands, the music on this masterpiece thus arrives in still-unexplored territory, where the infatuation with the Birthday Party dissolves into a suffocating, white-hot cloud of garage-noise-hard/blues — grim, deformed and insatiable, populated by monstrous phantoms bearing the sacred mark of free-jazz, of the harshest psychedelia, of the most rabid and epic post-punk, and of the most hostile grunge (let's not forget that Adelaide earned, in that very period, the title of "grunge city", partly to describe the sound of Grong Grong, among others). Visions of a future that looks a lot like a returning Middle Ages, a kind of sonic "Mad Max", only with a far higher dose of malice, and a more devious one at that. A Captain Beefheart suckled by the beasts of the Australian desert? Something like that...

Marking the leap from the previous record, there's also a noticeably more fluid instrumental weave and a more clearly defined relationship between composition and improvisation. Add to that the maturity the four musicians show in their handling of their instruments: Peter Hill, a devilish master of a vitriolic voice, a bottomless well of ferocity and moral filth; Charles Tolnay, spewing out treacherous psycho-noise snares; Bill Bostle, whose drums loom large with mighty tribal power; and newcomer David Quinn, whose bass proves more sophisticated and less physical than his predecessor's. But it's clear that the addition, on some tracks, of horns (Hill's trombone, Tom Sturm's trumpet and the saxophone of Adrian Hornblower III, already of Salamander Jim and later a collaborator of the Beasts Of Bourbon), of a piano (played by producer Dave Boyne) and of two extra guitars (Boyne again, plus Lachlan McLeod, also already a member of the band behind "Lorne Greene Shares His Precious Fluids") signalled a will to push further, to give the songs a strongly experimental breadth, an expressionist fury that until then had been obscured by the rubble of a sound that was "heavy" but not multifaceted, abrasive but not really capable of pointing toward new frontiers of sonic cruelty.

The opening "Worm's Eye View" is, by contrast, already a formidably powerful display of brutality and self-assurance: a whirling, panzer-like scansion, sudden barks and guitar frenzies that build up dense layers of circular cacophony. A danse macabre for souls torn by the doubt that their very existence is, deep down, an indecency: ⟦Q1⟧. In short, "that's the question to ask".

But the first true breakaway point comes with the instrumental "D.T.'s", a teetering incest of desecrated free-jazz and the bloody bulk of post-punk. While sax and trumpet rage, dazed but proud, and the guitars run amok like assassins, the voice takes shelter in indistinct declamation, a jumble of semi-spoken radio patter. "Modern dance" transposed into another universe entirely. There'd be every reason to put them hand in hand with David Thomas and co.: the orgiastic synthesis of garage-rock, unbridled primitivism, returning noise-rock, abstract psychedelia and a sense of the grotesque... But setting aside urban neuroses, King Snake Roost load their musical sensibility with an epic sense of boundless open spaces that draws, above all, on the lesson of fellow countrymen Feedtime. An epic quality that, in the apocalyptic gallop of "Trogman's Buried", takes on "desperate" hallucinations, nocturnal projections, bloody gashes... Tolnay's Hendrix-like flow and Hill's feral vocal (reaching an apotheosis of pure animal degeneration: " I had a mother and I called her Ma/ I had a Father and I called him Pa/ I had a troggie and I called him Ron/ I took a gun and blew'em all to kingdom come", with every last word practically spat in your face) together convey an endless sense of horror along with a grand, regenerative voluptuousness. This latter pairing runs from start to finish through the breakneck epilepsy of "Gutterbreath" too: fury on the run, from the slums toward miles and miles of nothing, riding a dream in constant disintegration. Hill attacks furiously, propped up by a noisy, torrential boogie: “Nothing could be worse than the rotting head/ Of a man three bottles old/ Turpentine scars on his nicotine/ ‘Cause his hands lost all control…”, and it feels as though the tribal fire is giving off premonitions of imminent catastrophe. Live, they must have genuinely set the crowd ablaze.

Boastful and repulsive, the pandemonium of "Shunting Yard" is born, instead, at the crossroads between a thoroughly pummelled boogie with the devil at its heels and the delivery of a shouter particularly inclined to wash down his cigarettes with whisky... Similarly, but conjuring up the spirit of Norman Carl Odom, aka Legendary Stardust Cowboy, (“Well, I’m gonna tell you a story / About a man from Texas / Born in Lubbock / That’s way down in Texas”), “The Ledge Does Vegas”) delivers a blues from/of the caves (in which Hill honours the memory of Howlin' Wolf by reaching a worrying level of psychosis...) skewered by odd trombone raspberries and closed out by a glorious chorus of drunken fools (the shambling lunacy of Zoogz Rift is just around the corner).

Then, "Everything Falls Apart" lurches masterfully between dissonant piano touches and abrasive stabs of free-form guitar that gradually build a wall of feedback-driven bruising. The pace is slow and coarse, almost mechanical, its true nature emerging by contrast against the relatively complex interplay of piano, guitar and voice. And while the stormy scowl of "Hammerhead"'s funk-core harks back to the rounder arrangements of the debut (albeit with a morbid ardour that's the product of their newfound expressive maturity), it's when the dynamics turn more reckless that even finer feats of grandeur are pulled out of the hat. "Acid Heart" might seem straightforward enough, but beyond picturing the Gun Club leading a suicide battalion (the chorus is defused — "She started screaming" — and the martyrs pay their dues...), what emerges is a lethal, pulsing, deeply abrasive groove. The obsessive weave of "Talking Turkey" — descended from Captain Beefheart, but filtered through the whip-crack lens of Salamander Jim — could alone convince you that nothing here is done by halves: the hypnotic pulse of the bass is counterbalanced by the drums' jazz imprint, while the guitar, lurking in the background, sways between acid fractures and noxious swamps of corrupted slide. It sounds like the pounding of some mammoth piston, the kind you might encounter on a journey to the centre of the earth. And it's very likely that voice, cursing rather than singing words of a ridiculousness that reeks of malice (“Talking turkey with the turkey/ Them gobblers never lost for words/ Talking turkey with the turkey/ Is strictly for the birds”), belongs to an angel (truly!) fallen from the sky. I mean, smashed to the ground.

Above all else, though, two of the highest peaks of 1980s rock experimentation stand tall. First of all, "Fried": anchored to a mighty riff played in unison by bass and guitar (putting some flesh on the Big Black skeleton), this track makes it plain that the progression is toward the most absolute chaos — contemplated rather than merely endured, admired for its elusive dynamism, for its dazzling, panicked epiphanies. Overwhelmed by the transcendental, anarchic magma of reeds, Hill rants, megalomaniac, like a serial killer caught red-handed. Thrilling and brutally visionary. "That Again?", for its part, is Feedtime's fetish object burned under the moonlight and worshipped all the way to ruinous rebirth. A rebirth that reeks (I mean the rebirth, of course...) of journeys to the end of the night, of moonlit benders, of dark convulsions of the heart. The napalm of the six-string, the reckless derailing (wreckage and unpleasant elegance) of the rhythm section, the vocal intensity (the pathos of the end, fear knocked senseless and translated into redemptive exaltation). Tragic and thunderous, like the death you never see coming.

This music, so obscene and so refinedly experimental, so saturated with morbid despair and violent spasms of lustful madness (as though hope's no-man's-land could only be found within the irrational — which, fervently, craves the very act of desire itself) — lays bare mankind's most aberrant instincts. Where Tolnay's pursuit comes across as one of the most intriguing destinations of the psychedelic-noise evolution (also readable as an unrestrained extremization of the crossed impact of fellow countrymen Turner and Secher-Jensen of Venom P. Stinger), Hill's voice, often used as a genuine sounding board for the most agonizing spasms of terminal existentialism, ventures into truly harrowing expressive territory. What King Snake Roost deliver is, in the end, an exasperated primitivism in which, alongside the uncertain sketching of an imagination pushed to its limits by the inhuman, blind will of a rebellious nature, there emerges the pitiless analysis of an impassive rationality. A rationality that channels pain and anguish into the thriving belly of a sound that, for all the venom it spits from every pore, always retains that charm and that "measure" which turn certain human creations into moments of genuine artistic illumination.

The record, needless to say, sold very poorly. Then again, Aberrant never pressed many copies to begin with. Bruce Griffith recalls: "Usually we'd press around 500 copies. Our bands weren't very well known, partly because even in Sydney itself they often struggled to land gigs. There was a kind of curse hanging over Aberrant's 'noisier' bands. Case in point: if King Snake Roost managed to land a show, chances were that, on that same night, in that same Sydney, These Immortal Souls would also be playing — and naturally, they'd scoop up most of the audience. All of that had an impact on record sales too. As for exporting abroad, before doing anything I'd make a few calls to the various exporters, just to test the waters: 'How many copies do you need? How many do you think you can actually shift?'. Only after that would we decide what to do."

In any case, in 1989 the band managed to set off on a two-month tour of the United States, where they got to share the stage with Babes In Toyland, Helmet and Hard-Ons. There, between October and November, at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, under the supervision of Butch Vig (who two years later would produce Nirvana's “Nevermind“), the songs for their third and final album took shape.

Ground Into Dirt (14 tracks, 41'45") was released by Tom Hazelmyer's Amphetamine Reptile, who never put it out for the Australian market. The Minneapolis label would later also reissue Things That Play Themselves on vinyl, which to this day remains the only edition available besides the original (and fairly rare) one on Aberrant.

The album on which the band settles into a "classic" sound, Ground Into Dirt relies on less magmatic, relatively more polished structures, even though the jagged edges and sheer filth of their sound reach pathological levels. With the funky cut of the bass restored, the band still has, in Tolnay's reckless jazz-noise excursions and Hill's bestial crooning, the essential pillars for developing a pointed discourse on moral decay. Drawing bluesy flavors from the acid electric spirals of "Cannon Fodder" and p-funk tensions in "Obscure Enough", "Travel Was A Meat Thing" and "Top Shelf", the quartet unleashes disgusting hypotheses of post-hardcore in the vein of Cows ("Stonge's Planet"), revels in the pulsing jazz-core of "You Are The Night" and offers, on "Sledge", its nauseating take on industrial-grunge, perhaps fancying itself the illegitimate father of Barkmarket, elsewhere (the crude whirl of "Can Of Worms") souped up on cocaine and amphetamines.

In the pairing of Quinn's driving bass and the atonal shattering of Tolnay's guitar, a clear post-punk lineage is still detectable, but everything is twisted, pushed to the point of paroxysm, as shown by the frenetic pace of "Adrenitude", the savage torment of "White Line Fever" and the vulgar convulsions of "Crowbar". Compared to the disjointed scores of Things That Play Themselves, these songs turn out, therefore, to be easier to digest. With the "surface" impact beefed up, the band leans on clearly recognizable load-bearing elements. There are exceptions, though, among some of the most fascinating moments of their career: the filthy, stunning art-noise marvel, garnished with vile guitar stabs, of "Pressure Cooker", the foul, self-destructive wreckage of "Zippo Reprise", and, above all, "I Am Hog", an assorted pile of gruesome emotional perversions (featuring one of Hill's most diabolical performances: "Call me hog/ I am hog/ Curly tail/ I am hog"). Tough stuff, worthy of the crudest Tragic Mulatto.

But the time was now ripe for a breakup. Quinn and Bostle are the first to leave, replaced for a while, respectively, by Gene Rivet and Craig Rossi, the latter coming from Box Of Fish. A few scattered shows, a few sketches of new material, but nothing truly capable of keeping the King Snake Roost creature intact.

The final split comes in 1990, after the band had the chance to record a Kiss cover ("I Want You") for the tribute album "Hard To Believe: Kiss Covers Compilation" released by C/Z Records. In the meantime, some of their songs appeared on the compilations "3 Countries For Sale" (Megadisc) and in the "Dope, Guns Fucking In The Streets" series. Tolnay stayed in the States and lent his guitar to Tumor Circus, a project Jello Biafra had put together by also recruiting Steel Pole Bath Tub. The others returned home, alternating between periods of rest and bursts of feverish activity. Nothing, however, that could even remotely revive the glories of one of the most important bands of the Eighties.

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