Tongue And Teeth – What Have We Done To Your Quiet?
The Internet has little to say about the significantly left-of-centre Tongue And Teeth . You’ll learn they hail from San Francisco, and then you’ll be led wholly astray by a solitary genre classification that reads: “Grime / Jungle / Melodramatic Popular Song”. You’ll also learn of the similarly-monikered Teeth And Tongue from Melbourne, but you’ll equally cast aside their insipid mewing quickly. What you’ll most frequently find in connection with Tongue And Teeth however is the word jam.
Hear jam, think psyche – at least that’s how I function, but you’d be wrong for jumping to conclusions. More aligned with the calculated clatter of acts like Comanechi , these jams are largely succinct, avoid hallucinogenic washes and are altogether more deranged that the normal psyche canon. What have they done to quiet indeed.
The band’s seven tracks squeak with the discordant energy of Karen O at her least silky. They spike and crash in considered mid-tempo graunches when, perhaps, a faster pace would have been more obvious. The ramshackle drums sound like they’re made out of cardboard and the exact paint pots used to decorate Big Black ‘s apartment circa 1986. The guitars run like fingers down chalkboards and echo on with cheese-wire feedback, the chirruping, bleeping, lolloping result hiding worming melodies under reels of breathy noise.
The most solid reference the Internet turns up to these masters of elusion is as follows:
“At night the dungeons beneath the old part of town resonate with tortured voices and weird metallic clatter. A pounding, syncopated rhythm accompanies the pained stanzas and just before the break of dawn, a huge throb passes through the trash-strewn streets making all the windows in the deserted factory buildings rattle. Scientists call it post-oscillations of a pre-historic incubator, street bums brag about whales humping, and deaf people compare it to sharp teeth gnawing at their spine. So far, all attempts at recording this phenomenon have failed – except for one.”
So far, it would appear all attempts at capturing this phenomenon in the written word have failed – except for this one. Don’t you just hate it when someone beats you to the punch?
~What Have We Done To Your Quiet? is out now on C30 via Skrot Up .~