BAND OF THE WEEK: Teeth Of The Sea
The psych-hive expands!
Teeth Of The Sea are one of those bands: six albums in, there’s still no real idea of what to call the music they do. Sure, we’ll throw “psych” at it in reviews and when recommending it to friends, but that’s a bit like saying that AC/DC play “rock” or Metallica play “metal”, it doesn’t tell you anything about the million nuances that make this now-trio so special. The press release offers, brilliantly I might add, that their remarkable new album ‘Hive’ is “a headspace where the psychic charges from records by Labradford, Nurse With Wound, Vangelis, The Knife, Nine Inch Nails and John Barry can happily co-exist,” for example. I read a great review the other day where it was said that it sounded like six albums playing at once, and while that is a great image, I would slightly adjust it to it actually being an expertly put together collage of six different albums. The idea remains that it is a feverish melting pot of clashing genres and styles - EBM, sci-fi soundtracks, techno, pop, a very metallic edge to some guitars, you name it! -, but not so much that it’s a dense jumble of layers. No, it’s in fact quite a flowing, simple listen, and do take “simple” as a huge compliment here. It’s music that will insidiously, just like the insect-human hybrid life-forms of the novel where lyrical inspiration for the album began, slither under your skin and stay there. No matter if you’re listening to it distractedly while you work or fully focusing on it with headphones, it will find a way there. Amid its seemingly innocent beats, shards of guitar and trumpet that cut you deep to then just flutter off into space again, even some dreamy vocals this time (on ‘Butterfly House‘, courtesy of guest Kath Gifford), ‘Hive’ feels unassuming and breezy at first, and when you least expect it, you’re neck deep into its potent spell and unable to move away. Not that you’d want to. Even at its most wildly experimental, it’s a surprisingly easy-listening record, again without the negative charge that expression might have in musical terms. Like on the amazing ‘Megafragma’, easily the most daringly adventurous song the band has ever written, and something that might be used as a foundation for future sonic explorations.
Great video too. Not creepy at all. Flaying digital wasps. I’ll let you know all the lovely nightmares they have inspired on my next post. In the meantime, do check out below the fantastic conversation we had with guitarist Jimmy Martin, a super cool dude and an exceptional musician and songwriter. He’ll explain this bubbling cauldron of influences better than I ever could. You’ll get to know that a TOTS WTFF is, and also we talk about Celtic Frost which is always something important to do. After the jump!
Teeth Of The Sea are:
Sam Barton
Mike Bourne
Jimmy Martin
“A nice by-product of never having a big commercial breakthrough, or even really trying to have one, is that we can still pretty much do anything we fancy.”
- Jimmy Martin
You guys have been around for a while, of course, but ‘Hive’ feels… special. All usual bullshit aside, do you think this is your best album? Or at least a sort of a different departure from what you usually do (if your “usual” is even something that exists, haha), a bigger leap of faith?
Jimmy Martin: Bands can often be the worst people to ask about their own music honestly, but predictably enough yeah we do think this is the best album we’ve ever done. I think the best way to quantify it really is that we surprised ourselves with this one. When the whole thing came into focus towards the end of recording and mixing, it had blossomed into something way beyond what we thought we were making, almost as if it had a coherent life of its own, and that’s a very special feeling; I don’t think we’ve really felt that since we made ‘Your Mercury’ in 2010, but this record’s both more consistent and more adventurous than that one.
There was something of a leap of faith definitely, we knew what we were doing would surprise some people, but we knew we weren’t making our ‘Cold Lake’, and a nice by-product of never having a big commercial breakthrough, or even really trying to have one, is that we can still pretty much do anything we fancy under the umbrella of Teeth Of The Sea. I think this is a big part of what keeps us excited after a terrifying seventeen years at it. Doing the poppier stuff on that definitely felt like scratching an itch that had been there for some time, which was very satisfying.
Was it actually Frank Herbert’s novel ‘Hellstrom’s Hive’ that inspired you initially, or was that just another literary connection to the current state of the world, i.e. on fucking fire, that sent you down this rather dystopian trajectory?
Jimmy: It’s strange the way these things almost act outside of your control, once again - the way the zeitgeist and your cultural frame of reference and what you’re doing musically intertwine. We never sat down to write a Frank Herbert inspired concept record, but as the character of the album started revealing itself, both that and the movie Phase IV seemed very fitting in terms of what we were trying to get across. We wanted to get a bit of tension and fear across but also a kind of beauty and sadness. Sci-fi’s always been a big thing for us, one of the things that gets us excited and inspired, and there’s a naturally dystopian path that takes you down. I wish it was less relevant to the here and now than it is, in all honesty!
How do you usually begin to work on an album and settle on the general idea, by the way? Do you sit down and talk about stuff, or do you just play and see what’s coming out, or both, or something else?
Jimmy: There’s always a lot of sitting around the pub nattering on constructively, a lot of sharing ideas musically and otherwise, a lot of nonsense, some jamming, people bringing rough sketches in, and it all kind of works like a process of osmosis. The good stuff stays, the more iffy stuff gets forgotten about, and there’s a kind of band chemistry - which is another advantage of doing this for ages - that means we all know when something is worth persevering with. The most exciting moments relate to the stuff you didn’t plan, the stuff that happens of its own volition.
Is the end result of ‘Hive’ much different from what you had envisioned at first, you think? Now that you have a little distance and you have the finished thing in your hands, what are the first things you think about when you listen to the album or when you look at the record?
Jimmy: I don’t think we had any idea what our sixth album would be like, and I don’t know that we planned what any of our others were going to be like either. I also don’t think I’ve got any distance from it yet! I’m genuinely excited by it though, which must mean something given I’ve heard all these tunes a million times. I’ve listened to it myself for fun more than any of our albums since ‘Your Mercury’. I love how much ground it covers, and it feels colourful and intrepid in a way that we’ve never managed before. It feels more melancholy and emotional than ever before too, and in an eloquent way rather than a mawkish one. I’m far from the best person to judge, but there again we are our own sternest critics.
It’s your second full album as a trio, if I’m not mistaken, is this an indication that you feel fully comfortable in this format? How would you compare ‘Hive’ with ‘Wraith’, by the way, if you had to explain these two different moments and how they are reflected in your music? From 2019 to 2023 doesn’t sound like an enormous period of time numerically speaking, but as we all know it generally seems like it’s been four decades and not four years…
Jimmy: We definitely are comfortable as a trio, and that’s not to take anything away from anyone else who’s ever been in this band. It’s just very easy in the creative process with the three of us now, we all respect each other a great deal and we’re all secure enough to take criticism when it’s needed without getting chippy or difficult, but don’t have the kind of egos where you get prima donna type problems. Also the different things we do complement each other well, which is handy, so we don’t tread on each others toes. I feel like we know how the lads in Rush felt.
‘Wraith’ was influenced by quite a turbulent period in the band post the ‘Highly Deadly Black Tarantula’ record in all honesty. That one was a pretty big experiment for us sonically, doing something a lot more visceral and stripped down, plus there were interpersonal issues going on in the band at that stage which did affect the art. I think we naturally wanted to react the other way with ‘Wraith’ and be more expansive, throw in the kitchen sink and reassert ourselves in a bombastic way. Once we’d done that, Hive was even more of a kind of “sky’s the limit” record.
Something really clicked into place when we decided to bookend the record with the tracks from the Apollo’s Moon Shot project, which were actually written shortly after ‘Wraith'’s release in early 2019. They were the product of a very specific burst of creativity which happened under duress owing to us having to go pedal to the metal and write loads of music for that gig at the Science Museum, but when we went back and listened to them we were struck by how powerful they were, so they had to stay. I think the friction between those somewhat elegiac and stately cosmically-aligned tracks and the wilder extremes of the stuff we came up with post-pandemic - essentially with nothing to lose - are what gives the record a lot of its magic.
The press release mentions ‘Megafragma’ as the most experimental track the band has ever created, which does make sense, do you feel like that as well? Was it a deliberate experiment that you did with Giles, and can it signal new avenues for future material? Are there any other tracks that you would consider particularly out of the regular norm for you guys?
Jimmy: A somewhat unfashionable influence on me personally is Vernon Reid from Living Colour, and he always used to talk about this thing called the ‘WTFF’, the ‘What The Fuck Factor’ - as in obviously you hear something and go ‘What The Fuck Is That?!” - I’ve always considered it very important to have a WTFF aspect to TOTS. ‘Megafragma’ I think was our attempt to do the ultimate TOTS WTFF track, so much so that we had to give some agency over to someone else so that even we were surprised by it. Luckily Giles knew exactly what we were after and delivered the goods in extremis. We wanted it to be structurally odd as well as sonically odd, and those reference points of ‘Simple Headphone Mind’ by Stereolab/Nurse With Wound and ‘The Bogus Man’ by Roxy Music are the best ways of illustrating this - maybe also some of the more outré moments on ‘Into The Pandemonium’ by Celtic Frost for me, although the other two lads I don’t think know that album? I love the fact you’ve got tunes like ‘One In Their Pride’ and ‘Tristesses De La Luna’ on there, and the way they contribute to making the whole thing such a glorious headfuck. We’ve always tried to have moments like that on our records - the kind of moments you hear amidst chemically altered epiphanies and can’t fathom at all. I suspect we always will.
How do you perceive the trajectory of the band throughout all these years, are you happy with the evolution that you’ve had and with the records you’ve put out? Can you look at, say, your discogs page and not feel any regrets or think of stuff you would have done differently? And do you still feel you have a lot to say with Teeth Of The Sea, is there real longevity to this band and this trio line-up?
Jimmy: We never really had any kind of gameplan with this band other than to play Bardens Boudoir in London in 2006/7 with some trendy American noise bands, and we were such a shambles that we spectacularly failed on that one right out of the gate, so the whole thing has always yet again taken on something of a life of its own. I love all our records, and if I had anyone I aspired to throughout all of this, it would be a band like say Circle who just kept on making mad records that made no sense to the wider world, but as musicians were constantly inspired by and evangelical about the art and music they loved. Also when we first met Gnod in 2009, we felt they were very much kindred spirits, as a band who didn’t give a fuck, who weren’t bound by genre, who were hedonists and genuine weapons grade bohemians, but people who took creativity seriously, people who were completely untouched by compromise or any kind of eye on the prize. I think if you approach your creative practice like that you can’t go too far wrong really. We’re nowhere near done on this path yet, and we may never be.
What are your plans after this album, do you think these songs will fit well on your setlist and are you excited to go out and subject people to them?
Jimmy: Christ only knows what comes next! But the live arena has always been where we’ve been in our element, we’re going to do everything we can to make it the most visceral assault we can do across the boozers and fleapits of anywhere that will have us, besmirching the modern day dystopia we inhabit, inflicting psychic damage and rattling bass bins alike with these tunes very soon. Be afraid! (don’t really be afraid)
You can find Teeth Of The Sea on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify.
