For The Hooves That GallopTeeth: the part of you that outlast you longest once you’re gone. That hold a record of what you’ve done with your time, tribute or rebuke. In comparison to their longevity, time for the rest of you is short. So, then – what to do with that time?
For the members of Brooklyn five-piece The Loom, the answer to this question – the reason that they choose to play music together in the first place – is the simple search for joy. It’s a concern that both far outdates, and is reflected in, the searching folk, intricate percussion, and psych-influenced dissonance and atmospherics that they love and wind into their music. But Teeth, their debut, is not all joyful. Like the music that inspires them, it focuses more closely on the myriad hurdles that ensnare us along the way.
As Daytrotter’s Sean Moeller writes, “It feels as if many of the people residing in the songs of The Loom…are in need of…something to re-energize the inner parts of them that they’ve had amputated against their wills…They howl up at an inanimate moon and they chant the same words over and over: ‘Something in the changing of the seasons will make us more alive.’”
The amputations Moeller speaks of are not the catastrophic sort, but the steady, subtle frustrations, regrets, and disappointments that can lead to numbing and slow unraveling over time. Anxiety, guilt, and the weight of expectation, offset by scattered bliss, are all things that The Loom experience as they settle into adulthood in 2011 and try to capture here, feeling a bit too old for unbridled optimism and a bit too young for abject cynicism. Teeth’s primary obsession is with that nagging disconnect, of knowing that one should feel joyful and fulfilled, while knowing that one often does not.
Throughout, close friends/de facto family John Fanning (vocals and guitar), Jon Alvarez (drums), Lis Rubard (French horn and trumpet), Dan DeSloover (bass), and Sarah Renfro (vocals and keys, though it is former vocalist Sydney Price who appears on Teeth) create a rich, dynamic sonic space. From somber drones of distortion and lonely French horn to manic layers of trumpet, guitar fuzz, and cymbal crashes, its resonance lies in the way these contrasts conjure the idiosyncratic personal details and experiences, both immense and minute, of everyday life. They tell stories of regret and renewal – of characters “doing their dishes in the dark” even while “trying to make the days feel long” – offsetting minor notes with major keys and tempering squall with calm, just as DM Stith’s striking cover image evokes both lightness and dissonance, growth and decay. Or, as “The Middle Distance” says, in a line that could be a statement of purpose for the record, “This is for the ones who still have joy inside their hearts – may you always find it where you don’t have to look.”