Album #50: Snow - 12 Inches of Snow

Snow

12 Inches of Snow (1993)

Well, I promised you a 90s classic today...and here it is. Snow (real name Darrin O'Brien), Canada's finest white Irish-Canadian reggae musician, and his debut release, the wonderfully named 12 Inches of Snow.

Better known as the album that gave us Informer.

And other songs apparently.

Researching the man's history though reveals much about his musical leanings. Growing up in a housing project in Toronto, his musical exposure during his youth was very much reggae and dancehall music....and it shows. Heavily influenced by reggae and dub, he grew to prominence by fusing reggae with other styles, particularly rock and hip hop.

So what you have here on 12 Inches of Snow is a reggae fusion that takes some of the hallmarks of hip hop (some vocal flavours, piano and horn samples, heavy bass and drum beats) and mixes them with Jamaican dancehall and reggae to create the sound of Snow.

Because I'm a nice person, I'm willing to expose myself to the sound of Snow and report back. If I don't return, tell my wife hello.

The Album

Wow.

I....um....wow.

So anyway, 12 Inches of Snow is, for all intents and purposes, supposed to be a perfect example of the dancehall/reggae fusion spoken about earlier. However, there are only maybe four or five examples of this heavy dancehall/reggae style on the album.

And, to be brutally honest, this is when the album is at its most tolerable. Snow's Jamaican patois vocal is quite good. Close your eyes and listen; you would swear you were listening to a Kingston native, rather than a Canadian from the projects. On songs like Runway and Drunken Styles, his breakneck Jamaican reggae delivery is spot on and (I can't believe I'm saying this) first-rate. Having said that though, of the two, only Runway is passable, because Drunken Styles is shithouse. 

There's also a really powerful (!!!) set of lyrics on the album's closer, Ease Up, where Snow blatantly warns the listener of the potential consequences of making poor choices in your youth, and you know that he speaks from first-hand experience.

Then, of course, there's the only Snow track the universe except for the 34 Snow fans (of whom one is comedian Drew Carey, I KNEW there was a reason I didn't like him) knows: Informer. And you know what? We can say what we like (Snow sure does, with all that 'Informer/you knakdjfhadskjfasuakelfnajvn,mcmvlkxvoifkasdiufhaef/A licky boom boom down/Detective man see asdkgjahsighakdspwerjoawiekfjnvnuaiewurhiawefjn4@#R5#$5%$&UUFDF/A licky boom boom down' nonsense) but there's a reason the song sold a metric fucktonne of copies - it's GODDAMNED CATCHY AS HELL. That Jamaican patois is at the forefront and is part of the song's charm. I know it's au fait to make fun of Informer - hell, I do all the time - but as a dancehall/reggae/hip hop/pop fusion, it just works.

That, however is the end of the positives. Then we go on to the negatives. And BOY OH BOY WOWEE BIG BOY are there plenty:

• Let's start with the song Lonely Monday Morning. More cool Jamaican patois vocal delivery, but wait what's that? He's mentioning Informer....detective man...come with a nice young lady....Daddy Snow is the Boom Shakata....FUCKING WHAT? HE IS REUSING HIS OWN LYRICS IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SONG. WHAT IS GOING ON??? WHAT MANNER OF SORCERY IS THIS????
• That closing track with the fantastic lyrics? Ruined by the worst rapping you've heard since Lou Reed. THE. WORST.
• The album is filled with questionable 'love ballads' that contain more cheese than if Monty Python's Cheese Shop Sketch was filmed in an actual cheese shop with actual cheese and featuring characters made entirely of cheese and called Mr and Mrs Cheese. The worst? Uhh In You. Snow literally (LITERALLY) sings the lyrics, "Girl you drive me crazy/All I wanna uhh uhh in you". YOU CANNOT UNHEAR OR UNSEE THIS SPAWN OF BEELZEBUB.
• It's like Snow put Informer on the album as the seventh track and went FUCK IT NOBODY WILL LISTEN TO ANYTHING AFTER THIS, so filled it with the worst songs ever.
• 12 Inches of Snow? Dude 10 of those inches are limp and show no signs of having any erectile tissue whatsoever.
• But the worst song? YES. THE WORST SONG? Creative Child. Imagine, if you will, that the worst song you've ever heard was recorded by the worst band you've ever heard, using out-of-tune cheap Chinese student instruments on a 1980s cassette tape deck that your children filled with sugar so that every time you try and record something, the tape has this horrible periodic scratchy sound. The song was only issued on 8-track tape except 7 of the tracks don't actually work so all of the audio is only on 1 track, oh but most of it is very quiet so you can't really hear it, so all you hear is the faint sound of dreadful-sounding $50 guitars and possibly some recorder and the drums are actually those little plastic ones you buy for three year olds and you can't even hear all of that very well because the sugar in the cassette deck makes the sound go CSSSHHHH CSSSSSHHHH CSSSSSHHHHH every ten seconds.
  
  Now imagine that experience was made worse through magnification by a factor of about 10^6500000000.
  
  The resulting song, a song so heinous that it would probably cause the universe to rip itself apart and return everything to complete nothingness, would still be better than Creative Child. The rapping makes his work on Ease Up (that I just compared to some truly fucking horrendous rapping by Lou Reed) seem like the second coming of the Wu-Tang Clan, the 'choruses' of Snow repeating the mantra 'Creative Child' like if he keeps saying it it'll come true is enough to make you envy the deaf, and musically there is no music, just an atonal dreck.

I feel unclean even writing about that song. UNCLEAN.

The Verdict

If Snow had stuck to faithful fusions of classic dancehall and reggae sounds on this album, only going to other genres sparingly, I don't think this would have been a complete waste of time. As it is though, all the crap ballads and abominable rap tunes render the few decent moments on 12 Inches of Snow almost meaningless. 

I stand by my comment that as a reggae vocalist, Snow is actually pretty fucking good. He makes that Jamaican patois sound like the most natural thing in the world, and that is far from easy to do even for a Jamaican vocalist. Unfortunately on this album, there's not enough of that.

There's plenty of dreadful though.

My rating: *

Standout Tracks

Informer

Runway

Tomorrow, a slight change to the schedule; in memory of Bob Casale, who passed away today, I'll be listening to a classic Devo release, and hopefully helping people understand why Devo are, for all of their weirdness, still a very influential band.