Hot Snakes played Brighton Music Hall – 6/8

Blistering California post-hardcore quartet Hot Snakes returned for their second Boston show in the past year with support from Chicago’s Meat Wave and locals Vundabar on Friday night. 

On the heels of last year’s excellent reunion effort Jericho Sirens, Hot Snakes are very much back in action. A part of the sprawling web of John Reis and Rick Froberg-associated projects – which notably includes Drive Like Jehu and Rocket from the Crypt, among others – the band initially formed in 1999 and disbanded in 2005, before reforming in 2011 and finally hitting both the studio and the road in earnest last year.

Friday’s show, much like last November’s Middle East gig, offered plenty of favorites from the group’s three pre-breakup LPs along with the new songs, which sound right at home. The foursome whipped up their signature garage-punk fury in style, with Reis bringing his percussive string slashing as far into the crowd’s collective face as possible (I had his foot on my shoulder within the first song).

Any band in the Reis/Froberg orbit is pretty well guaranteed to deliver a singularly thrilling rock show, and there was certainly no exception here.

Meat Wave and Vundabar rounded out the killer triple bill, with the former’s grim motorik noise-punk complementing the latter’s playfully surf-tinged garage stylings. Check out photos from all three sets below.