It’s no secret that Whittier Bar has been demolishing the booking game. Tulsa has become a “must play” city for myriad genres in a global sense, and Whittier is front and center in this zeitgeistical shift. Argentina’s Zeta have played twice in half a year, and Swedish bands like Screamer and Sacramentum have played shows there that led them to spread the “don’t fly over Tulsa” gospel.
With this steady booking, Whittier has become a place where you can stumble in any night and find something unexpected. Judging by last Thursday’s turnout, plenty of Tulsans expected to be melted, but I wandered in for a drink and got completely gobsmacked by Nashville’s Snooper.
Noise kids, street punk dads, Pinterest punks, and Whittier regulars congealed in a sweating mass with the fervency of a circle pit, yet with more Richard Simmons than Tai-Bo in the movements.
In a day and age where record companies and traditional promotional platforms have crumbled, streaming and DIY have mushroomed from their festering stumps into a multitude of enumerable fungal genres and aesthetics. And gimmicks get bands noticed. Sweating from dancing and screaming to Snooper’s set, I realized almost at the end that they had a “gimmick,” but it had nothing to do with the electricity and freshness of their sound. The band members started in gym class gear — windbreakers, joggers, coach whistles — and their singer repeatedly shed layers until her outfit was suited to the martial and hyper-manic aerobicise dance she commanded the crowd with.
The gimmick snuck up: something about PE class, I guess. With a giant inflatable … mosquito? Doesn’t matter. Snooper didn’t need it.
Their aesthetic is borne out of the hyper pop mishmash of genres, samples, and graphics championed by 100 Gecs and the late Sophie. But the sound is fast as fuck, train beat, bullet to your head garage punk. Major key three chord rippers with shralp and squelch guitar sirens punctuated the Gang of Four Tomahawk drums. (The missile, not the steak.) A little like The Strokes on pre-workout.
Bands are often described as “tight” when they can twist and turn and stop on a dime, but Snooper are vacuum-sealed. Full-on blasts-of-rage bpm posi-punk were interstiched with micro bursts of silence tighter than a farmer’s butthole driving his tractor on an oblique incline.
Start. Stop. Dance. Rage. “Sweating to the newbies” could be their genre classification.
The guitarist wore and utilized the coach whistle (as much instrument as implement of fury) but it was vocalist Blair Tramel’s yelps about “running,” “stretching, and “fitness” that held the crowd in consistent fury. But topics and sonic cues on their debut LP touch on deeper anxieties.
Tramel recently told Northern Transmissions that she wrote the lyrics for “Running” while “deep in the pandemic.” “Most days, all I could do was go for a long walk or run,” she said. “I think sometimes that’s all anyone can do when things feel out of control. We can always get out of our minds and into our bodies. Move, breathe, jump, put one foot in front of the other.”
In a world where everything is quite literally on fire, we’re lucky to have Snooper keep us moving.
Next at Whittier Bar: Pineapple Willows, Oct. 20.
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