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Virginia’s Garage Rock/Punk Band SNAKE LEGS Released New Album “Eat Your Food, Dear, There's Starving Children In Detroit” on December 19th on Electric Talon Records!
- The Metallist PR
- Jan 23
- 7 min read
SNAKE LEGS, the garage rock/punk creation of the musician Mike Matteson, is proud to announce that his new album “Eat Your Food, Dear, There's Starving Children In Detroit” is available on the main digital streaming services from December 19th via Electric Talon Records!
Stream/download it here: https://tlgent.ffm.to/sl-eyftscd
This is what Mike Matteson stated about his new album:
“The second Snake Legs album is finally here. There are many differences between the two. The first album was drums/guitar/vocals. This one is drums/bass/bass/vocals. I used 4 mics instead of 1 on drums. I did the bass instead of using amps. I rapped. While the first album has a theme of death/murder, or at least allusions to it, this one is bloodthirsty and frequently suicidal. I mean, even though the first album was called DEATH, it was just a coincidence that all the songs had something to do with death. This one is intentionally violent. I'm Thinking Thoughts was the first song I wrote. As I often do anymore, I thought it was so great that I spent the next year trying to write an album around it. Blow is actually a song by Kick Out The Rouge!, which is my friend Cam Kirkpatrick’s band. He had a minor hand in this album turning out the way it did because we were having a conversation over facebook messenger when I think I said, “eat your food, dear, there’s starving children in Detroit” in response to something, and he said something along the lines of that sounding like it should be the name of an album. So I decided right then and there that I would make an album and name it that. I don’t think it was long after that I first wrote and demoed I’m Thinking Thoughts, which is basically a rip off of his old band, The Pom Pom Girls, where he was the bassist/vocalist and there was a drummer. He agreed that I was ripping him off when I showed the demo to him. And then this last winter I had just recorded the bass and drums for what I thought would be the final mix when he sent me the new Kick Out The Rouge! album All The Tall Poppies early and I listened to it and realized what a shit job I did. His album was sheer explosiveness. Mine was dull. So I decided to redo my album and go way harder with only one goal in mind: to be as explosive as possible, all else be damned. So this is what I got. Unfortunately I totally did not do justice to my cover of Blow. The Kick Out The Rouge! version is way better. But it fits the theme and it’s a perfect song to dedicate to Elon Musk and my landlord. More on the eviction later. I Don’t Wanna Be A Human No More is probably my darkest song. While the other ones are either suicidal or just plain violent, this one is about the seemingly endless capacity for violence in humankind. Think about it. Forget world peace. Has there ever been a time in human history where there wasn’t an active genocide? Has there ever been a time in human history where whole groups of people weren’t enslaved? Large scale violence is so normalized that there’s a Shell station every few miles down every road and people continue to buy Shell gasoline despite what they did to Nigeria. I get called out all the time for making a big deal out of this stuff because everyone knows that there’s not one gas company that hasn’t done something similarly evil. I’m supposed to act like this is all normal. I’m supposed to act like this is a fair price to pay for the convenience of the modern world. These people can kiss my ass. The lord knows I’d kill all these crackers if I had the ammunition. So, yeah, I don’t want to be a part of humanity anymore. If just being alive and consuming the bare necessities required to live an average life supports all of that, then yes, I would rather not be a part of that. It’s Coming From The Inside is a song I wrote. The Stromboli Incident is a retelling of the true story of me getting mugged for my stromboli. Kill An Emo Kid For Punk II is the sequel to Kill An Emo Kid For Punk from the first album. The first one was more about the screamo emo scene kids. This one is about the midwest emo/college emo people. And then there’s Muhammad Ali. I wasn’t supposed to rap that one. I hit up a local rapper here and asked if he’d like to do it and he was initially up for the challenge, but he backed out after he found it too challenging. That’s when I started hearing the lyric, “Bomaye Muhammad Ali” in my head and I decided to give it a shot. So I wrote my rap and when it came time to record I one-taked that shit. Just fuckin laid it to the tape.
I do hope people hear this one. I think I made a good one. Hopefully it’s the kind of album that wakes people up a little bit and gets them back to the gritty side of rock and roll. I still love the LA scene that I’ve been obsessed with for the last 10 years, but I have to admit that most of the artists have gotten away from their roots. The recordings are cleaner and the songs are more polished, but it’s time for a wrecking ball to knock it down so something new can come up. Like, Thee Oh Sees are making electronic krautrock albums now. And that’s cool, but it’s time for the next wave to come and make their albums like The Master’s Bedroom and Help. Ty Segall is making thoughtful acoustic ballads about parenting from his house in the California hills. It’s time for someone to make the next Reverse Shark Attack. So that’s what I hope this does. I hope some 16 year old hears this and says, “you know what? I’m not gonna wait until I can make a clean recording of me playing perfect chords. I’m just gonna play one note as loud as possible and scream and if it clips, who gives a fuck?” Music is just more fun that way. Somehow, if you think too much when you play and record, it stops being rock and roll after a while and just becomes noise. All this crap I made, as noisy as it is, is rock and roll. Keep it simple and let it rip. If it would piss off Rick Beato, it’s probably good. And I say that as someone who loves Steely Dan and is currently working on a 20+ minute Steely Dan rip off. But I know, for better or worse, I am an uncompromising individual, and if I do decide to jump off a building or take a lethal hit of heroin, at least I can say that my rock and roll was authentic, crude, straight from the source, 100% uncut, unprocessed rock and roll. I’m well aware that nobody cares, and that in fact the few listeners I have would rather me polish this thing up a bit, but they know if I stopped releasing shit like this, then I’d stop being me. I think there are albums that are better as legacy pieces than as listening pieces, and that’s fine. Like, I don’t really enjoy listening to the pre-Badmotorfinger Soundgarden albums, but I like knowing that they are there. I like what they are. They provide depth to Soundgarden’s legacy that wouldn’t be there if they just put out Badmotorfinger, Superunknown, and Down On The Upside. And even though this isn’t really linear in regards to time, I feel in a way that putting out albums like this is how I earn the right to put out stuff like Memory / Gravity, Healer, and other clean/accessible/poppy/sappy/self-absorbed shit, like a 20+ minute Steely Dan rip off. Like John Mayer earning his credit as a fantastic guitarist in the pop world by putting out a fantastic blues record every once in a while.
So, yes, this album is the reason I got my roommate and I evicted. We lived in a one story duplex with a basement. Our first neighbors, Tony and Sue, were really cool and liked the music. Then they moved out and the place was vacant from about September to January. Midway through January, new people moved in. Before we played any music I met them and made sure we were good to play and that they had multiple ways to contact us if we were too loud or not playing at a good time and that we could work together to make everything work for them. They were cool about it. The next day I recorded the drums and bass that you hear on the final mix. The bass is all DI so that wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but I did beat the ever-loving shit out of the drums. I one-taked almost everything once I did a little trial and error to get the mics placed correctly. The whole thing probably took two hours, and half of that was setting up to record the next song. That was a Sunday around noon. Tuesday night we got a letter from the property manager. They didn’t want us to move in because they knew we were musicians. We assured them it wouldn’t be a problem, as we are decent human beings and we have managed to play music in townhouses before. They only agreed to let us live there under the condition that if any of the neighbors submitted a noise complaint, we would be evicted. It never was a problem with the neighbors. But when I recorded the drums, the landlord was next door addressing a maintenance request that the neighbors put in. They didn’t say anything at the time, but they left that letter on our door that night saying that they were taking it upon themselves to evict us because I was drumming. The agreement was not that we couldn’t play music, but that if the neighbors were fine with it then it would be fine with them. So those motherfuckers gave us until the end of February to move out. Now I have an eviction on my record and I’m living in the only place I could find that would let me live there, and it is a complete shithole. So yeah, this album is how I got here.”
Tracklist:
1. Dinner Time (I'm Not Hungry)
2. I'm Thinking Thoughts
3. Blow
4. I Don't Wanna Be A Human No More
5. It's Coming From The Inside
6. The Stromboli Incident
7. Kill An Emo Kid For Punk II
8. Muhammad Ali
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Mike Matteson. Artwork by Grey Haas. “Blow” written by Kick Out The Rouge! Drums recorded by Mike Matteson & Kenny Vaughan.
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