Drinking From the Necks of the Ones You Love

I have absolutely no idea where, when or how I first heard These Arms Are Snakes and as much as I'd love to say that the very first encounter monumentally altered the course of my life for ever, it didn't. With such an introduction need I really sell the band any more?
These Arms Are Snakes are a progressive, post-hardcore band from Seattle. To be honest, this is pretty much all the information you need. If a sentence containing a band name as fucking awesome as that coupled with those two genres isn't enough to get you scrolling to the bottom of this post to the download link then I don't really know if I can adequately sell it to you.
In the truest sense of what I understand the post-hardcore genre to be, the music of TAAS is, in a nutshell, schizophrenic. It has that mix of lilting, fragile beauty and ear drum splitting cacophony. At their most 'post-hardcore', TAAS are nowhere near as dangerous and insane as At the Drive-In but the music is just as powerful, hard rocking and intense. All that being said, there is more atmosphere and melody in the releases of TAAS. That isn't to say that the band is airy fairy in anyway, but more that they lean towards the more melodic 'post' aspect of their genre than the balls to the wall, circle pit loving 'hardcore' part.
At times they do tend to verge on Math Rock, with complex rhythms and angular guitars. There are times of dissonance, staccato rhythms and atypical song structure but these apects never threathen to over come the music as a whole.

While At the Drive-In always give me the impression of a group of insane individuals who all hate each other (and their instruments) squeezing into a tiny box room and thrashing out an album in about an hour with instruments they found in a 2nd hand shop, These Arms Are Snakes seem to be the antithesis within the same genre; they're artful, considered and (compared to AtDI) their chaos is harnessed and restrained.

This Is Meant To Hurt You is the band's 2003 EP and the first release of theirs I heard and owned. It's 5 songs are all perfectly brilliant, each song a highlight, each boasting a different aspect that has those hairs on your neck stand to attention. This is exactly what EPs should be; almost a mini album, a few songs of brilliance, rather than stop gap dross that other bands put out. And the cover is brilliant, every time I see it I fell culpable in a gritty, New York crime. Time to take a shower to wash the guilt off....

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