K9 Sniffies - Master's Touch

K9 Sniffies' Release Party for 'Master's Touch' is Friday, Arpil 8 - INFO - ft. Feelings, Blood Stone, and DJ Erin Smart@ Donovan's (3003 W. Vernor Hwy, Detroit)$5 / 9 PM 

Today, I write about "...insanity music."



Detroit-based ruckus-rock quartet K9 Sniffies started streaming their first proper full length album, Master's Touch, about 48 hours ago... Once-local (but, now, currently Montreal-based) music mystic Fred Thomas helped record a baker's dozen of K9 Sniffie's signature hectic-frenetics last March, along with contributing some keyboard action to the two songs you hear streaming on my site, today...



K9 Sniffies have been kicking around for several years, with a handful of releases here and there along with steady local performances. I know we say this is a "first" full-length, but they've got their avant-operatins down pat, by now, having released a few cassette EP's like Dog Style and Dehydration Guys.

Joe Wojtowicz, Ryan Kiblawi, Graham Sefton and Brian Polsgrove have taken to owning the idea of "insanity" as a genre, a resourceful and refreshing move on their part... Why call it noise... or punk ...or whatever other kind of word-soup sapped of substance...? What are we really doing, here, when we flank to bars and shuffle right up to the amplifiers? Sometimes the best means of maintaining sanity is to lose one's mind to music...!  Can dissonance lead to some deeper form of spiritual awakening? If we cannonball into feedback whirlpools and grate our ears with distortion, can it be qualified as something akin to scream-therapy when we finish the two-minute tantrum feeling ineffably rejuvenated? Is any of this making sense, or is it, indeed, pure insanity?

K9 Sniffies have evolved into something more than your typical garage-punk provocateur. They're satirists of the every-day, critiquing the commonplace, wreckers of reality... I mean, sure, they do so in the form of confrontational lyrics and disorienting swells of feedback and synthesized-cacophony, but the temptation...the encouragement, towards concentrated insanity as a form of freeing one's mind? It's still there... sutured somewhere in the static and reverb...