Police Teeth Are More Awesome Than Anything

I’m gonna tell you about Police Teeth, but first I’m gonna tell you about the last twenty years of my music-listening life. For the sake of context, goddammit.

In the 90s (not going back any further than that, cuz you’ll probably laugh me off as an irrelevant geriatric who can’t possibly know anything about music), The Jesus Lizard ruled my world. Early in the decade, I caught on to their smiling, manic aggression and held their brand of rock above all others. Blessed to receive everything on Touch & Go’s mailing list, I looked forward to EVERYTHING The Lizard had to offer after that first taste of the quartet’s debut Head. The Jesus Lizard made the most spare, sinister music I’d ever heard; all pent-up tension, precision-delivered by grown men who knew exactly when to pull back and exactly when to wail shit into submission. That, and they were fronted by an Iggy Pop-sized man-beast who’d wrap himself up in silver duct tape like a hillbilly begging to be shot into space, grunting and growling his way through the hottest, sweatiest live performances I’d ever seen.

In the latter half of that decade, my heart fell apart, a condition that The Jesus Lizard did not deal with much. I was lucky enough to discover The Wrens and their epic Secaucus, and in that inexplicable way that art and music work, The Wrens helped me to better understand my broken condition.

In the run up to the new century, while I was still an emotional basket case, I discovered Modest Mouse. At the time, I was traveling to Portland quite often to visit my girlfriend (who is now my lovely wife) Valerie. I would read Willamette Week and see the name Modest Mouse topping the bills of Portland clubs and topping the sales charts of the great little records stores on SE Hawthorne. The dichotomy of Isaac Brock’s straining to understand the entire cosmos while in the next moment shrugging his shoulders at the whole thing appealed to me on every level. There is nothing more perfect to listen to in the constant rain.

Early into the next decade, I came across Mclusky purely by accident. I was dorking off at work (I used to oversee the manufacturing of piss-test drinks – you know, the stuff they sell at porn shops) and came across “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” on some early version of Pandora (before there was Pandora) while throwing data into some Excel spreadsheet that no one would give a fuck about within a week’s time.

Holy. Shit. The Jesus Lizard was controlled chaos. Mclusky… they were fucking anarchy. I had a favorite new band. My heart was healed (Val and I were married by then) and Mclusky fully appealed to that reptilian part of my brain that still squirmed around in my skull. After a few years, Mclusky disbanded (no one can sustain their type of intensity for very long without bursting into flames) but came back as Future Of The Left, a more melodic, slightly less chaotic version of Mclusky. Future Of The Left made two violently loud and brilliant (and funny) studio elpeez, plus a live one where they mercilessly torment a crowd in their hometown of Cardiff, Wales, but now they too are undergoing changes and no one really knows what the future of Future Of The Left will be.

I was adrift there for a moment.

Here we are at the start of a new decade. The Jesus Lizard will never come back (David Yow nearly killed himself on the second-to-last night of shows in 2009 because KIDS THESE DAYS DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH SWEATY ROCKERS LUNGING AT THEM FROM THE STAGE — they dropped him, the dumbasses). The Wrens still play (and kill you softly) but you gotta go to their neighborhood in Jersey to hear ‘em.

Which brings us to Police Teeth.

What ROCK band is there left for me to love? Maybe it’s Police Teeth, and the main reasons are these: there is enough sheer noise to get my basal ganglia twitching, but there’s also enough melody and lyrical relativity to nuzzle my limbic system and elevate this whole thing called Awesomer Than The Devil into something that I feel deeply about. Take “Summertime Bruise” (brilliant title, eh?) for example. This band (James Burns on vocals/guitar, Chris Rasmussen on bass, Adam Grunke on guitar and Rich Boyer on drums) rampages out of the gate with some totally amplified guitars that sink in like grappling hooks and pull you in to tell a quick story about friendship in terms any normal working-class person can understand. Who hasn’t propped open a window with a bottle? Who doesn’t want to skip work in favor of staying up all night, hanging out and talking to old friends? “Summertime Bruise” is loud and beautiful, two words that pretty much sum up the entire elpee.

Loud and beautiful specifically describe “Dude Handler’s Permit” (another brilliant title, and perhaps another name for “bartender”), where Police Teeth show a staggering command of their resources and whip up a guitar shitstorm. My old ears work with my worn out brain and make a snap analysis: Rasmussen and Burns sound like Rick Sims (Didjits, Gaza Strippers) teamed up with Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock doing something that falls between The Didjits “Top Fuel” and Modest Mouse’s “Doin’ The Cockroach”… but it’s better, especially when they trade off the phrase “There’s nowhere left for you to go” between each other toward the end. I have no idea what the track is about, but I want it to be the song that’s playing as the bartenders make last call.

So yeah. New decade — does it belong to Police Teeth? Could be, as far as I’m concerned. At this point in time, they are more awesome than anything else out there.