These Arms Are Snakes - This Is Meant To Hurt You

With a style that warps such hyphenated genres as post-hardcore, psych-pop and space-rock into an EP of 23 minutes, These Arms Are Snakes are forging a new style, aesthetic and sound into indie-rock’s often rigid canon. Merging members from Botch, Kill Sadie and Nineironspitfire into a band that proceeds to crack the confines of hardcore that they previously created with their former bands, their EP, This Is Meant to Hurt You, encompasses everything from sassy pop hooks, spastic vocal effects, speaker-slashing screams, guitar crashes of chords, and ambient keyboard drones. It’s this sense of expansion that twists their past musical pedigree into something wholly different from not only their previous sonic incarnations, but post-hardocre’s history as well. This Is Meant to Hurt You’s music zigzags back and forth between formerly alienated genres, adding stylistic diversity, progressive tendencies, and an unpredictable, impassioned flare to These Arms Are Snakes’ music. Is it avant-punk? Prog-rock that’s fun? Space-rock with a hardcore bent? Whatever you want to call it, it’s better than pretty much everything else you’ll hear this year. [www.thesearmsaresnakes.com]