I’ve toyed with the idea of skipping a Best Albums of 2011 list this year and going with a Best Riffs list instead. I’ve already started compiling some contenders—the mathy breakdown at 2:24 on Mercy Ties’ “Cave”, the central Entombed-style guitar line on Rotten Sound’s “Choose”, the opening fuzz riff on Helms Alee’s “8/16”, the inexplicable palm muted chug that keeps changing tempos at 2:23 on Craft’s “I Want To Commit Murder”, and that moment of genius at 2:37 on Adebisi Shank’s “Micromachines” where they drop into halftime while the guitar loop churns at double speed. But then a record like Sandrider’s debut 12” comes along and gums up the whole plan. The seven songs on the record are all total riff-fests. Picking just one isolated moment off the album would be damn near impossible.

Not that this should come as much of a surprise. Sandrider is comprised of Nat Damm and Jon Weisnewski, best known as 2/3 of Akimbo, a band whose slogan is “eat beer, shit riffs.” Add bassist Jesse Roberts of the syncopation-punks The Ruby Doe and the bottom-heavy hooks are inevitable. Perhaps the only surprising thing about the Sandrider album is that it took so long for these seven songs to see a proper release. Though recorded by Matt Bayles (Mastodon, ISIS, Blood Brothers) back in April 2009, the band’s side-project status and intermittent show schedule apparently made pressing the album a low priority
. Fortunately, new Seattle label Good To Die Records swooped in to make the self-titled record one of its first releases. And good thing too—it would be a shame for so many mean riffs to go to waste.

Let’s do a quick inventory. “Children” kicks off the album with an orgy of big chords and kick-and-crash drumbeats straight out of the Karp textbook. It’s this kind of massive open-power-chord stomp that characterizes the bulk of the album. “The Corpse” mixes up the attack plan by opening with some serpentine single-coil John Reis-style guitar licks before getting back to the overdriven bash at 1:15. The two riffs intermingle throughout the course of the song until fusing into one blown-out monster at 3:53. The third track, “Crysknife”, is pretty much one five-and-a-half-minute-long steamroller, but get to the 4:55 mark and you’ve got yet another contender for the Best Of list when the trio launch into a polyrhythmic beatdown. “Paper” uses the same tactic at “The Corpse” by mixing single-string riffs with thunderous chord progressions at the 2:23 mark. Then there’s the moment on “Scatter” at 2:05 where the initial note progression—already pretty fierce in its own right—gets beefed up with a dose of distortion.