SINIS
Live at Dante’s Pleasure Palace (Hypeshop)
In the Austin School of Big Dumb Rock, you can’t get much bigger or dumber than Sinis. And that’s a good thing. An earnest appreciation for the society of the spectacle is all one needs to enjoy a Sinis show, and while Live at Dante’s Pleasure Palace doesn’t quite put you in the front row, it does do an admirable job of whetting the appetite for flashpots and power chords. Sinis is a throwback to when rock music embraced whiskey and women instead of self-effacing emasculation. We’re talking about the brand of hedonistic bombast that went down for the count when Guns ‘N’ Roses fell apart. The local fivepiece conjures the visual onslaught of Kiss, the ear-splitting groove of AC/DC, and the Southern-fried perspective of Black Oak Arkansas. While bad boy sentiments like “Skin Flick” or “Layin’ the Pipe” might have seemed ponderous when MTV-neutered cock rock was the dominant paradigm, what’s left of “modern” rock’s false promise makes balls-out bacchanal look positively refreshing by comparison. You can hear it in the crowd’s enthusiastic response to Johnny Thundernips’ masturbatory guitar solos. Sinis’ success owes as much to music as it does to the fact they don’t just stand onstage and look at their shoes. They demonstrate once again how gut-level entertainment will always strike a more universal chord than jangled introspection.
This article appears in December 3 • 1999.
