Teeth Of The Sea____
Experimental Londoners hit a most progressive note on Wraith.
Teeth Of The Sea’s avantgarde art rock adventure began more than 10 years ago when a group of likeminded souls met in a record shop. Equal parts absorbing and bewildering, you can continue to expect the unexpected from these purveyors of weirdo rock with their new, fifth album, Wraith…
As any voracious music obsessive will tell you, record shops are magical places. It may be a thrill that future generations will never experience, but record shops are where many (perhaps even most) of us began our profound and lasting relationship with music. As an added bonus, record shops are great places to meet kindred spirits, which is exactly what happened to Jimmy Martin. A founder member of genre-hopping art rock crew Teeth Of The Sea, Martin spent many years working in the Oxford Street branch of HMV in London, during which time he met several likeminded souls and hatched a tentative plan to form a band.
“It all goes back to when we went to a [US extreme noise mob] Wolf Eyes show in London,” Martin recalls. “We were basically struck by how a band could be really noisy and avant-garde but also really hedonistic, up for it and banging at the same time. So we all made a pact that night to do this band. Then we went to the rehearsal room and it was accidental chemistry, I suppose. Two of us were trained musicians and knew all the scales and had been in loads of bands, and two were total rookies who’d never been in a band. The chemistry came from those two guys stopping
the two musos, of which I was one, being pretentious and too up themselves and we kept it from being a complete shambles. So it was the sparks between those things that sparked it all off.”
A decade on, the band that emerged from that burst of shared inspiration and collective nerdiness are about to release their fifth full-length album, Wraith. Teeth Of The
Sea have steadily become one of the most acclaimed and respected bands in the weirdo rock underground. Each of the band’s albums to date has offered an absorbing, challenging and often bewildering experience, covering everything from turbo-charged krautrock freakouts and flat-out noise assaults to unsettling ambient jazz and shimmering Morricone-esque soundscapes, all of it thick with psychedelic menace. Looking back at their evolution, Jimmy Martin notes that Teeth Of The Sea have reached this point more by happy accident than calculated design.
“When we first hooked up with Rocket Recordings, we were still essentially taking a six-pack of Stella to a rehearsal room and making a racket,” he grins. “It was just five lads making a horrible noise. But from that point, we realised people were taking it seriously, so we started to take it a bit more seriously, too. But we would never in a million years have thought that we’d get to make five albums and tour all over the world and all the rest of it.”
Newcomers to Teeth Of The Sea’s music should expect the unexpected. Wraith is certainly recognisable as the work of the same band that made 2015’s ragged and intense Highly Deadly Black Tarantula, but there is an even greater sense of wide-eyed abandon and gleeful disregard for convention coursing through the likes of thunderous, superbly titled closer Gladiators Ready; a masterclass in slow-burning atmospherics, it climaxes with a wild and wonderfully obnoxious crescendo of screeching acid house noises.
“We could have easily looked at that bit and thought, ‘This is a bit stupid, come on, we can’t do that!’ But, to be honest, most of our best bits have come when we’ve just gone ‘Fuck it!’” Martin laughs. “So yeah, it does sound like Josh Wink’s Higher State Of Consciousness, but it’s a great tune so why not?”
Wraith’s other most instantly jaw-dropping moment is Visitor: an eight-minute synthesiser mystery tour with insistent trumpet refrains and an infectious, loosethat limbed groove. Like much of Teeth Of
The Sea’s music, it sounds like an artfully constructed piece of left-field cleverness but was, in truth, conceived and constructed in the band’s dingy rehearsal space, emerging from a single impromptu jam.
“That was the moment when I knew this record was going to work,” says Martin. “We came up with it in one band practice, over the course of two or three hours. There’s a rough demo recorded that night that pretty much sounds like the record, albeit recorded on a shitty dictaphone! But generally, someone comes in with an idea and we work around and see what happens. It’s a more oldfashioned process than it probably seems.”
Wraith was recorded at Lightship 95, a studio on a moored 550-ton ship sited on the Thames in deepest, darkest East London. Not surprisingly, such an unusual location had a subtle influence on the way the band’s music developed during the recording process, eventually leading to the conjuring of a title that seemed to sum everything up nicely.
“Honestly, it’s a nightmare, titling our records,” Martin gripes. “But there was a sense of the album being eerie or haunted by certain things. Where we recorded it, on this boat, it’s in this strange kind of liminal zone where you’re technically still in London but you feel like you’re out of it. You can’t wander to the corner shop and there are no pubs. It’s only 15 minutes from the DLR line but you feel like you’re out on a limb. So there was this eerie vibe that we were trying to get across and Wraith seemed to bind it all together as a concept. You can always tell when you’ve got a good title because it doesn’t involve everyone moaning!”
Record shops might be vanishing at an alarming rate, but their most enthusiastic advocates are still out there, making the strangest music imaginable and daring to say “Fuck it!” at every available opportunity. And, unlike HMV, they appear to be in this for the long haul. Strap yourselves in, music nerds.
“It feels like having a baby, finally getting this album out,” Martin concludes. “It was a really inspiring process and I’m really happy with how the album came out, but you do go to hell and back making it. Whatever kind of Frankenstein’s monster emerges from all the ideas and the chaos, that’s what our records are. We’ve all been really invigorated by making Wraith, so we’re keen to get back to business, and hopefully get even weirder and more out-of-order, if we can!”
Wraith is out now via Rocket Recordings. See www.facebook.com/teethofthesea for more info.
“We’ve all been really invigorated by making Wraith, so we’re keen to get back to business, and hopefully get even weirder and more out-oforder, if we can!”