Ugly Casanova
Sharpen Your Teeth
[Sub Pop; 2002]
Rating: 7.3
Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world
crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric old men: a
legitimate redneck. Hailing from a rural logging town thirty miles
east of Seattle, Brock grew up in a rusty trailer, doomed to the
blue-collar nightmare of foundry life or some other back-breaking
eternity. Over the past ten years, he's seen the backwoods town's
tall pines and muddy soil swallowed alive by the corporate monster
and shit back out as duplexes and strip malls. What little nature
remains there now is permeated with the death stench of ChemLawn
yards and Wendy's drive-thrus. So, after the success of Modest
Mouse's classic The Moon and Antarctica, Brock packed up
and moved to Cottage Grove, Oregon, another even more remote
logging town-- one whose chances of becoming a suburban hellhole
are about as likely as his mother's of winning a Powerball jackpot.
Brock is extremely candid in interviews about his love of drugs,
particularly psychedelics and uppers. As everyone knows, there's not
a lot to do out in nature but get high, and there's nothing
like getting high in nature. It gets you thinking about the broader
picture-- typical hippie shit like your place in the universe, and
the usual depressive shit like your own mortality and irrelevance.
This kind of environment can't be good for a guy who, beneath his
surly exterior, is about as depressed as a motherfucker comes. But
it helps him write, and when that's all you've got going for you,
you go where it comes easiest.
I have little doubt that Brock wrote a great deal of the lyrics for
The Moon and Antarctica on psychedelics, as many of his
insights were so disconnected and profound that they could only
have come to him in a moment of altered consciousness. But recently,
including during the recording of that album, he's spent a lot of time
in stone-sober Chicago, where psychedelics are considered hideously
lower-class and drink is the drug of choice. None of this affected
his magnum opus-- presumably because he was still hanging mostly with
his druggy bandmates-- but Brock's solo debut as Ugly Casanova reeks
of mental clarity, sacrificing the great philosophical lyrics of
records past for pleasantly poetic, but never revelatory, subject
matter.
Brock recorded Sharpen Your Teeth with Red Red Meat's Brian
Deck, Califone's Tim Rutili, Pall Jenkins of Black Heart Procession,
and a few random others at his Portland home studio, Glacial Pace,
which he built using the advance Sub Pop offered him to record this
very record. But let's consider his company here: Deck-- producer of
the last Modest Mouse album and the first installment of Brock's Ugly
Casanova side project-- for all his culvert reverb and glistening,
interstellar software tricks, strikes me immediately as a man who has
either never ingested a poisonous mushroom in his life or has long
since outgrown such leanings. Rutili's work with Califone is marked
by its junkyard percussion and Budweiser Americana. Jenkins sounds
like he walks around in graveyards all day praying for inevitable
death to just get it all over with. This is no company for abusing
prescription tranquilizers.
But maybe that's the purpose of this project, to step away from the
pursuit of universal knowledge and convey a simpler desperation. Or
maybe he just wanted a new cast of characters to collaborate with.
And this is indeed a collaboration. Though the songwriting-- which
all members had a hand in, right down to the lyrics-- sounds
unmistakably like Modest Mouse, you can hear the distinct marks of
all the other players. It's initially evident on "Spilled Milk
Factory," and later on "Pacifico," both of which feature clanging
percussion and sparse background peripherals echoing Califone's
Roomsound.
The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course,
yields a few missteps, the worst of which stumbles backwards and
breaks it neck: "Diamonds on the Face of Evil" is an awkwardly
loping experiment in which Brock recites a few lines of nonsense
padded with the ceaselessly hollered refrain of "shey shaw shey
shaw!" Likewise, "Parasites" comes on like some absurd postmortem
parade, with blaring synth trumpets and Isaac morbidly insisting that
"the parasites are excited when you're dead/ Eyes bulging, entering your
head/ And all your thoughts... THEY ROT!" "Ice on the Sheets" is, at
6½ minutes, repetitive and overlong, and "Bee Sting," though surely
intended as a segue, hinders the flow of the album-- a tuneless
interlude with Isaac offering some of the least thought-provoking
lyrics of his career.
There are some damn fine moments here, though. Brock seems to have
been born with an innate talent to impart the sourest dejection. His
approach is more akin to Arlo Guthrie than to the mop-headed, crybaby
adolescentry that presently dominates our rock. If he stuffed his
shit with 75-cent dictionary finds, it'd be one thing, but he uses
plain English to communicate complex meditations, analyses that could
as easily be grasped by drunken farmhands as by world-class poets.
The finest of these crops up on "Hotcha Girls," when Brock, at his
most austere, sings, "Don't you know that you'll rust, and not belong
so much, and then get left alone.../ Don't you know that old folks'
home smells so much like my own."
The opener, "Barnacles," has Brock referencing classic Rolling Stones
amidst antisocial daydreams: "I don't need to see/ I don't see how
you see/ Out of your window/ I don't need to see, I'll paint it
black." Then there's the killer two-song punch that ends the record:
"Things I Don't Remember" recalls the very best upbeat and
rhythm-oriented Mouse moments, with truly propulsive percussion
hitting with ferocious thwacks, as if trying to better the Pixies'
"U-Mass." When the song springs to life out of the pleasantly
countrified "Smoke Like Ribbons," it hits with such caffeinated
urgency that its surrealist lyrics actually become incredibly
fun where they might otherwise have been fatally clumsy.
This guides us to the reflective closer, "So Long to the Holidays,"
which evokes both wistful memories of past Christmases, and going
off somewhere to die-- and with just two simple lyrics.
Sharpen Your Teeth was undoubtedly a therapeutic outing for
Isaac Brock, giving him some time to recuperate from his band's
definitive statement and temporarily alleviating the pressure of
making the next one. And lucky for us, the final product fares far
better than these things generally do. Rutili is an able guitarist
and lyricist, as is contributor John Orth (who got his start in the
Florida-based band Holopaw), and Brian Deck's production, though
sometimes excessively spacy, is always warm and nicely balanced.
That said, I'm looking forward to Brock falling back in with his
old crowd. The drugs might not be good for him, but the inspiration
is.
-Ryan Schreiber, May 13th, 2002