REVIEW: Little Venom Sneers and Snarls on Debut “Sabotage”
It shouldn’t be surprising that Little Venom already have their shit together right out of the gate. The band isn’t exactly made up of neophytes. Luca Cartner is a fantastic session drummer with credits all around the city, and Ana Von Huben lays down bass with the rollicking Rat Queen when she isn’t coming up with literally the coolest posters. Ricky Hoyos has been playing guitar since 14, and his work with the relatively new Tio Nacho’s House is superb. And Alaia D’Alessandro is Alaia D’Alessandro: as pitch-perfect a dissenting voice as she’s always been in Tres Leches.
If Little Venom is already post-punk perfection on paper, “Sabotage” is the first step toward that ideal actualized. D’Alessandro and Hoyos play the foreground; Hoyos’ chords hit that wonderful akimbo dissonance we now associate with all things American post-punk, while Alaia’s vocals sneer and snarl, fluctuating between melody lines and sprechsegang. Behind them, Cartner proves his mastery of the kit through deftly “musical” choices - note how tightly he leads the band’s ritarando at the end, and how he switches from toms to crashes when the drama calls for it. Von Huber’s bass backs him up, and where Hoyos’ instrument smears, her’s punctuates. I wish it were higher in the mix, although Rubén Anzaldúa [El Shirota] and Mauricio Wicho Avendaño otherwise do a killer job capturing the din.
“Sabotage,” in D’Alessandro’s words, is about radically pruning the dead, poisonous parts off of your life. If punk has historically concerned itself with destruction, then that might be the healthiest form of destruction there is. Quit your job! Leave him! It’s radical self-care for its prospective terror, and in their taut tempo changes and livewire playing, Little Venom that feeling gleefully. “Know you wanna have me/But I’m not your fucking secretary,” D’Alessandro closes in a line Kim Gordon would have been proud of. Meanwhile the processing on her “la’s” turns her voice into an ersatz wah-wah pedal that merges with Hoyos’ cackling strums.
More more more more more please. That’s all. I’ll be waiting.