Milwaukee's Snag released a collection of live recordings earlier this year, which they captured from a set they did for Brew City's famously eclectic local radio station, 91.7 WMSE. Curses. (the title of the previously mentioned live bout of on-air anxiety attacks) is certainly worth checking out if you're into heady, heaving, and emotional intemperate rockers in the style For Your Health or Youth Novel, and if you find that you dig on what they're laying down, then you just might want to reel the wheel of time back a little further to 2021 when Snag dropped their second LP. Death Doula is a fairly concise release, at just 7 tracks and about 20 minutes in total run time, but its brevity belies its depth. This was an ambitious record for the band, attempting to capture an urgent sense of crisis without becoming overwrought with despair; it's distinguished by powerful and impeccably timed performances that are embossed with unexpected flourishes that delicately clarify their intent. The serpentine rhythmic capsizes and revolutions of tracks like "Jar Spell" and dagger-sharp riff downpours, that will snow you into a world of hurt, a la "Weathervane," are what you'd expect from a band like Snag, (and son, do they deliver!) but it's likely not going to be these tracks as much as the spells of subdued tension that bide their time wading into the funerary brass procession on "Heirloom," or the prairie folk guitar picking of interlude "Next Morning" which will warrant an instant replay. You'll like need to hear these later tracks a few times in a row to make damn sure you just heard what you thought you heard, and it's not just the devil in your ear playing tricks. Trust your ear; there is nothing amiss. This is honest-to-maker, Midwest hardcore punk that hits hard like a February blizzard, and which permits emotions to bubble and roil up through the soil like slurry from a freshly dredged superfund site, but which has a cleaning cathartic balm to it, and the potential to leave you with a crisp sense of refreshment like you've just lept from a tire swing to land shin-deep in a clean, babbling brook. There was a time when people used to cop to the term screamo, but those days have been long since the past. Death Doula far more ambitious and far less weary of pretense than half the records you could have pinned that black badge back when it was something any self-respecting group of musicians might have averred to avoid. Whatever taxonomy you assign them to, you'd be right to put Snag near the top of the chart.
*In March I am writing a fresh review for every day inspired by a different color. I picked Snag's Death Doula to go with the color Charcoal as it seemed to pair well with the album's environmental messaging and general anxiety about the planet's habitability in the near future. According to some, we might be living on one big black spinning brisket floating through space before very long.
