You're My Lover Now

Album Review

Philly-based "pub-punk/indie pop" quartet the Teeth live up to their name with a sound that suggests candy-coated floss being run through the cracks of molars still swollen from the debauchery of the previous evening. Led by guitar and bass slinging twin siblings Aaron and Peter MoDavis, both of whom are barely tamed by longtime friends and equally visceral bandmates Brian Ashby (guitar) and Jonas Oesterle (drums), the Teeth filter the theatrics of early-Bowie, Mercury and Bolan through an uneven crack in the garage door that brings to mind a baroque Pavement, the Replacements and even the raw power of Eat Your Paisley!-era Dead Milkmen. Their full-length debut, You're My Lover Now is crass, eloquent, heartbreaking, hysterical, sloppy and tight as a three-inch stitch. Played excruciatingly loud, the listener is forced to periodically duck for fear of having a chair, beer bottle or set of false teeth land in their laps. It's not a particularly elegant or sonically superior recording, and the careful trimming of a track or two would have improved the longevity of the ship as a whole, but in this sink or swim age of MP3s and mash-ups one may as well hang the whole package from the end of the plank. Like the house band that lives inside of the smoke-damaged, department store speakers that you inherited from your parents when they switched to a home theater system, the Teeth spit out song after song about summer-soaked urban hedonism filled with Jacques Brel-inspired couplets like "I spend nice days indoors, holding in my guts" without a hint of mopey despair. From the bawdy opening notes of "Molly Make Him Pay" to the ballsy, street-corner swagger of "Ball of the Dead Rat" the Teeth put the evil back in vaudeville, the fun back in funny, and the hope back in hopelessly romantic.