Hornets and Snake Rattle Rattle Snake (plus bonus SRRS vid!)

The smell of a thousand dead hornets decaying in the little space above my kitchen cabinets has left me in a thoughtful mood presently. The smell isn’t quite dead animal smell – it’s dead insect smell: an odor normally so minute that it would never register, but multiplied by a thousand, it reeks horribly.

The scary part was that before the exterminator came, I heard this faint noise in the kitchen above the cabinets that sounded like if you were to ball up a plastic grocery bag and let it re-expand next to your ear. To think I held my ear right up to the little crack where only a centimeter of wood veneer separated me from a thousand living hornets.

Consistency, Oscar Wilde said, is the last refuge of the unimaginative. The things we do can become so tedious at times – so incipient that we don’t even realize it. Then life puts hornets in your roof and you realize it’s time to stir things up a bit.

Snake Rattle Rattle Snake is stirring things up and I like it. Their songs are complex, tying together two percussionists, two guitars, a bass and keys it explores weaving rhythms and spacey riffs, but you won’t find the audience droning out and bobbing their heads – people are dancing. The mood in the music is driving, infectious, fun and it feels new.

It’s no wonder that the members all come from other great local bands (like Monofog, FYI). These are the imaginative doing something inconsistent just to see what happens. Bless them for it, and bless those damn hornets too for making life a little more interesting.

Keep drinking and rocking,
The Bartender

Bonus video of SRRS at the Larimer 9/26/09