Balls-to the-barbed-wire, no-nonsense, no-new-ideas rock. The Imperial Vipers are going to kick a hole straight through the floor, apparently.
Like early-90s British leather-trousered cock-grungers Skin (who you will have very little good reason to recall), the Imperial Vipers have that beery sound of a band who insist on inserting pointless nicknames between their first and last names (if I was in their band, I would almost certainly be Tommy ‘Peggo’ Pegg). This is a band of rockers who like to make rock music but would rather not waste time on coming up with their own ideas. So they gleefully plunder the rock canon of big Supersuckers-style derivative riffery, allow their singer plenty of attempts at straining his bollocks in the manner of ACDCs wrinkly shrieker Brian ‘Beano’ Johnson, and leave other bands to worry about such troublesome things as invention or experimentation. There is nothing particularly wrong with this approach – there is almost something charming about the band’s lack of ambition or pretension. But there is also something very boring about it.
