Music Reviews from the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House

 

April 10, 2025
how not to fall in love with the snake charmer - legbiter
Label: self-released
Catalog #: no catalog #
Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Release Date: March 28, 2025
Media: digital download
bandcamp.com entry
discogs.com entry

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House begin this review with a cautionary note. While we are avowed listeners of non-idiomatic improvisation, we accept that beauty comes in various forms, across and between idioms. We like to suppose that we possess the liberal capacity to open our minds to different types of beauty beyond our typical fare. Delving into pop music is not without precedent in the archives of the PPPH music reviews. For example, in the not-so-distant past, both the last two albums on the PPPH Top Ten Albums List of 2019 could be reasonably described as some variation of adventurous pop music. Such is the case with this present review. And now with this unnecessary disclaimer behind us, we can proceed to the matter at hand.

On how not to fall in love with the snake charmer, Chicago's native daughter, reyna amenbreak, returns under a new name, legbiter, as she constantly reinvents herself with each new album. She chooses to describe the album with various tags, including pop, electropop and hyperpop, the nuances of which are outside our knowledge. The music possesses rhythm and melody and a near constant barrage of catchy hooks. After listening, members of the PPPH staff have found themselves humming the tunes as they labor in the library or the garage. It was this persistence in our memory, which often drives us to pen a review.

reyna amenbreak is descended from an erratic line of pseudonymous poets and artists. She exercises this family heirloom of creativity in a manner unlike her predecessors, unbound by thoughts of tradition. Still, the album is, in good measure, a soul-baring performance, in which the courage to expose oneself and a visceral release through expression are both present in the lyrics. The music is assiduously composed to accentuate and elevate the message of the words.

how not to fall in love with the snake charmer contains eight songs, each quite unique from the others, ranging from just under three to nearly six minutes in length. For the remainder of the review, we present a snippet of lyrics for a selection of the songs, followed by a few thoughts on the individual track.

  • track: peregrine~
    • I remember being sick when the tide went out
      I remember when a snake bit you on the mouth
      I think you knew it was way more serious than you told me
    • The song shifts from completely distinct musical themes, some rhythmic, some melodic, some dissonant, as if someone made several jigsaw puzzles with the same pattern of pieces but with different images. Imagine the pieces of puzzles of Monet's "The Water Lily Pond", Miro's "Woman and Birds in the Night", and maybe Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" dumped into the same box. Because the original puzzles shared the same design, it is possible to assemble a complete puzzle in which the disparate pieces fit seamlessly together, delivering an image that is simultaneously coherent and fractured. That's what the music in peregrine~ is like. For example, the dance melody is punctuated by percussive interjections that are equal parts drum and laser-gun sound effect. In fact, this mixed-puzzle metaphor could be applied to a number of the songs on the album, the difference being the particular images that are combined on each track.


  • track: hntfilwtsc
    • I made a list of all the things I shouldn't do
      Crossed them all off one by one for you
    • The first single to the album, hntfilwtsc, is a title track shortened to a rather unpronounceable acronym. The theme of the song, as we interpret, is the exploration of the eternal tension that an individual experiences as they seek to define themselves within the context of the people with whom they have chosen to be surrounded. The autotuned chorus is put to especially useful effect here.


  • track: thoughtseize (ft. Left-Handed Scissors)
    • Feel like i forgot how to want things
      Haunt me
      Let it fall please
      Fall
      And I still wish you would call me
      God please
      I'm a proxy
      Just call

      You make me
      Hide in your closet
      To have you for moments
      Like god to a prophet
    • In thoughtseize, reyna amenbreak is joined by the mysterious Left-Handed Scissors of whom we are completely ignorant. Still, the pairing of voices is a successful recipe. The clever change of pacing and emergence of emotive chords import weight to the lyrics as they are delivered, lodging them in the portions of the brain associated with memory, both of intellect and emotion.


  • track: dark matter
    • I wear that one pair of pants,
      you used to love how they fit me
      They looked better on you,
      I felt so weird about it
    • dark matter is the second single from the album. It is a short and upbeat pop song. Wikipedia, the oracle of all contemporary knowledge, defines dark matter as follows, "In astronomy, dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects that cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be observed." The song is aptly titled. All the same elements of this definition could be described with more or less accuracy to the song itself. It is a place where invisible and hypothetical forces of personal interaction are impacted by the gravity we exert on each other and cannot be explained by theories governing the observable relationships between individuals. Of course, in both instances, the investigators, astronomers in one case and artists in the other, feel the cosmic implications of dark matter.


  • track: crystal in your chest
    • This is one of those movie moments
      I wish I wasn't so in my head
      You make me feel so damn hopeless
      Do you know that?
    • In crystal in your chest, reyna amenbreak leads us along a parallel between the heart and the mineral world, though the analogy is not the typical uncaring heart-of-stone but rather the crystalline geode, in the center of which there is space to be occupied. The song as a whole reminds us of the words of American pianist, Vijay Iyer, who wrote, "One could say that the animals' temporal acuity exists "in" these long neural pathways — in the physical structure of the perceptual apparatus. A working hypothesis, inspired by the existence of such structures, is that precisely timed rhythmic activity involves the entire body in a complex, holistic fashion, combining audio, visual, and somatosensory channels."* That is to say, there are moments in the song where the ability to cause the body to sway in sympathetic response to the music is irresistible.

    • *Iyer, V., Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African American Musics, Ph.D. Dissertation, Technology and the Arts, University of California, Berkeley, 1998, p. 24.
      •


  • track: demilich
    • And she said "I tend to treat my lovers clinically
      And it gets me no relief"
      I said "I think that I should love you minimally
      Just to save myself the grief"
    • For those unfamiliar with the term, we provide a definition of the title, demilich. "Great wizards and sorcerers usually became liches in order to continue their pursuit of magic and power beyond death. Demiliches were those who were close to reaching the end of their arcane journey; who understood the nature of magic and reality in a way no mortal could conceive."* We understand that describing the subject of one's romantic interest as a demilich conveys a definite ambivalence. It is the mixing of the conflicting emotions on either side of the ambivalent border that gives this song its energy, especially apparent in the bombastic coda.

      •
    • *Collins, A. & Cordell, B.R., Epic Level Handbook, Wizards of the Coast, 2002, p. 174-177.
      •


  • track: seamstress
    • To the point I was dreaming of life as a seamstress
      Clothing you golden, black, and red
      Maybe a worthier love could have seen this
      Losing a seam to save the thread
    • This sweet little song was our favorite on the album. It possesses the best qualities distributed among all the tracks on the album. The lyrics are thought-provoking, sincere and sensitive. The music plays a flawless supporting role in the delivery of the words. The constant change of musical style and tempo through-out the song is executed to perfection.


As an afterthought, there may be an element of non-idiomatic creativity in this album. We say that because, at the bottom of the bandcamp page, there is a statement, "If you like legbiter, you may also like:" followed by a list of pop albums. We investigated the first half dozen entries in the list and found nothing that really resembled how not to fall in love with the snake charmer nor struck the same resonating chord within us.

personnel:

  • reyna amenbreak (written, performed, produced, mixed, and mastered by) musician's website

 

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