SnakeOil’s The Wild Side begins with a question and spends the next thirty-three minutes making certainty feel increasingly unreliable.
The debut album from Nick Cutrer’s project draws heavily from the colour and looseness of 60s and 70s psychedelia, but its real subject is perception. Across nine tracks, he moves through classic rock, garage, folk, alternative and psychedelic textures while returning again and again to the instability of what we think we know.
Years before the record was finished, the artist found himself on the balcony of a college apartment when a maintenance worker hauling a refrigerator stopped below and asked him, “Are you real?” He answered with another question: “Would you believe me if I told you?” And that unusual exchange points directly towards the record’s central preoccupation.
Opening track ‘Would You Believe Me If I Told Ya?’ frames the album in that uncertainty, while tracks such as ‘Sleeping & Nothingness’, ‘Marbles Of Haze’ and ‘Fate Twister’ emphasise a record continually slipping between the concrete and the surreal.
Musically, The Wild Side benefits from being recorded to analogue tape at Tiny Telephone in Oakland. The production is warm and vivid without becoming overly polished, allowing grit, colour and immediacy to remain part of the songs themselves. That analogue character suits the frontman’s writing, which looks to conjure atmosphere without losing the directness of a rock band in a room.
‘Babylon’ and closing track ‘Acid Rain’ provide some of the record’s broader canvases, while the shorter ‘Amber & Hazel’ acts almost like a flash of memory between the more substantial pieces.
Cutrer also handles the majority of the instrumentation himself, with Benjamin Connor contributing drums on several tracks and Amanda Cutrer appearing on lead guitar for ‘Babylon’. And the largely self-contained approach gives The Wild Side a strong internal identity without making it feel isolated.
For SnakeOil, distortion, haze and surrealism are ways of testing reality itself. The Wild Side may not offer many firm answers to its initial query. Instead, it sounds far more interested in what happens once you stop trusting the question at all.