Here’s an album that has been thoroughly worth the wait. Recorded in 2011, released the following year, and here we are reviewing it as 2013 limps home – don’t let anyone ever tell you that trakMARX isn’t a hotbed of temporal flexibility. Such indolence isn’t entirely our fault – the Oakland trio’s debut album is quite evidently so good that their German label aren’t keen on letting go of copies. Even sending hard cash failed to shift their determination to keep Midnite Snaxxx all to themselves. Ultimately, resolute determination ensured that one was finally pressed into our hot hands. Don’t thank us – we’re just doing our job, citizen.
Locating the chase and cutting immediately to it; the record’s a stormer. Twelve tracks that tap unerringly into the doomed allure and fatal sweetness of the Ronettes and Shagri-Las and accelerates through Ramonic velocity via supercharged infusions of the Snaxxx’s own devising. This, of course, has been done before. But rarely this well – it’s a matter of assimilation and projection that Joey Ramone understood, Johnny Thuders understood, and Mindite Snaxxx understand.
Heralded by Renee Leal’s bass, ‘Can’t Win Your Heart’ thunders in, adding the sheer joyous abandon of early Undertones to the menu of mouth-watering ingredients. ‘SOS’ reinforces the band’s station in the girl-group/Ramones lineage. Adorned by Dulcinea Gonzalez’s unfussy/sumptuous vocals, the track can barely contain its own fizzing momentum.
The band’s second single, ‘Guy Like That’, emerges as a sugar-rush escapade, wherein teenagers get kicks, give head, and ultimately become lobotomized, while ‘Here And Now’ crashes in as a buzzsaw extension of the ‘Teenager In Love’ narrative. This is primal rock’n’roll, coated in caramel and flambéed to perfection. ‘In Your Eyes’ climb’s upwards through successive gears, gathering momentum through Tina Lucchesi’s stomping rhythms and superb vocal interplay, which also features heavily amid the blitzkrieg bake-off of ‘October Nights’.
Sweet and jagged, the unstoppably infectious ‘Turn Off The Radio’ gets the flip off to a Rezillo-esque start, before ‘Bayside Baby’ distils the girl-group death trip to a crystal of simple perfection. ‘Spend The Night’ features more pneumatic mortars from Tina, while Dulcinea juxtaposes a savage guitar solo with the song’s lovelorn lyric. ‘Like Lightning’ (the band’s 2010 debut single) makes a welcome return here – it’s a track that encapsulates everything that is great about the Snaxxx’s influences, reconfiguring them in ways that raise small hairs on the back of the neck.
The breakneck ‘Heart Full Of Doubt’ exultantly slams the album into its final track, ‘Goin’ To The Zooooo’. Gloriously unhinged, the song presents comparison with the Dickies, blasting along in a madcap manner before exiting via the primate enclosure. And then they’re gone. It’s a brief album, but when the job gets done this effectively, there’s little need to hang around. The band also released a third single, ‘You Kill Me’ in 2012, but there’s been nothing since. We can only hope for another helping – in the meantime, get your pith helmet on and track down a copy of this outstanding set.
