Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Sleetmute Nightmute’s 7-inch “Whites.” Listen to it below and read about it after the jump.
I have a video of Brutal Truth playing in Phildelphia in the late ‘90s and Rich Hoak, their drummer, smokes weed before they play, then takes his shirt off, keeps on his acid wash jeans. He looks about 120 pounds and plays blast beats. I watched this video a lot in eighth grade, about the same time I was listening to a lot of Bikini Kill (“I said I wanna come over/ you said, ‘okay, just come over’/ your friends are all on the couch/ your friends said ‘let’s walk around’/ I’ll pretend your friends are my friends/ and I’ll kinda try not to offend them/ but I won’t let you see anything real”) and those two things were concrete blocks of mental taste for me, fast drums and women screaming. Sleetmute Nightmute, in addition to shredding, is fast drums and women screaming (a bunch of them!) They only ever released this 7-inch (and only half of it is really killer) and one song on a Kill Rock Stars compilation. Google’s way back machine confirms that they would have put out a record on Troubleman had they not broken up (says one Seattle insider, because of intra-band relationship problems). “Whites,” part of a lengthy canon or just some one-off NW post-teenage thrash garage jamming, is ideal Schnipper: starts at a million miles an hour and then, actually, I don’t care about anything else (even though it is awesome). Listen to the first minute and fifteen seconds: really fast, yelling, little rubbery break, really fast, yelling. The rest is noteworthy enough (particularly the bonus noise gobbledygook at the end) but it’s really in the contrast, the fact that the song didn’t end then, though it could have. Do you watch Project Runway? Did you see last week? How they made super couture dresses and then the mass-market version? It’s like that; first bit is high class, second half is dumpy for the rest of us, a necessary symbiotic existence.
Related:
- March Is Schnipper Month: K and L
- March Is Schnipper Month: S and T
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- March Is Schnipper Month: A and B
- March Is Schnipper Month: O
- posted on Jan 22, 2008 in SLEPT ON
- tags rock, Sleetmute Nightmute
