High in the mountains of West Virginia lies McDowell County. Formerly a hotspot for American coal mining, technological advancements and outsourced labour crept through Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century, leaving communities like McDowell destitute. From 1950 to 2020, the county saw its population fall by over 80%, and by 2015 it had the highest number of drug-related deaths of any county in the United States.
Alongside abandoned buildings and burnt-out cars, McDowell County is dense with churches. Typically Pentecostal, these have become a refuge for a community on the fringes of a zombified American dream clinging to bygone prosperity. One is The House of the Lord Jesus, also known as the last remaining snake-handling church in America.
Led by Pastor Chris Wolford, The House of the Lord Jesus venerates the glory of the big man in uniquely Appalachian forms. Sermonising is done less with a cross and holy water than with venomous serpents and jars of strychnine, a practice popularised in the early twentieth century following a literal reading of Mark 16:18: “They will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all.” The Pastor Chris Congregation band is also something special – and obscurist label Sublime Frequencies have taken note.
Recorded live over a two-hour sermon, West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up the Serpents” lurches between rumbling lo-fi rockabilly and testing Christian blues that veers a little too close to bandeoke. Producer Ian Brennan sutures in some studio psychedelia through looped and delayed vocal interludes, but it’s the berserk, writhing nature of the crude jams that exposes the transcendent fault lines beneath this perturbing release.
Across the record, Pastor Chris is sharp and charismatic on the perpetually blown-out mic. Screaming and adding extra vowels to the end of every word like a gospel Mark E. Smith, Wolford’s outbursts fizz above the heat of overdriven amps, cheap tambourines and shimmering feedback.
His barbaric yawp takes in ADHD medication, Starbucks, the tribulations of soap operas and Satan stealing rock’n’roll from dutiful Christian folk. In the aptly titled ‘Don’t Worry It’s Just a Snakebite (What Has Happened to This Generation?)’, atop the incessant twang of shoestring Telecasters and junkyard drums, Pastor Chris howls as a worshipper is bitten, the track gathering in fury till it collapses upon itself.
More an ethnographic oddity akin to the Ocora recordings than something you would play before Sunday lunch, the LP’s coarse nature inhabits an unsettling, wild landscape à la The Family Jams. In a land abandoned by capital rather than God, They Shall Take Up the Serpents stands as a relic of a lost territory, populated by those too pious, too dangerous and too American to die.
