Ugly Casanova's Sharpen Your Teeth
There are albums you dance to, albums you cry to and albums you play to piss off your parents. Then there are those albums that rip through your chest and tear into your heart and fill you with a strange, golden and bittersweet nostalgia?a nostalgia for something that has yet to happen?a wave of sound that pushes through you until it hits that quiet space where everything is deep, raw and true.
Who exactly created Sharpen Your Teeth, a compilation of haunting, eerily beautiful tracks, is somewhat of a mystery. If one is to believe the press release, Ugly Casanova is actually the mysterious Edgar Graham, a half-mad yet startlingly enlightened Modest Mouse fan who endeared himself to the band at a Denver concert, played before a few of their shows and subsequently disappeared (as half-mad geniuses are wont to do), only to resurface in the form of a "faded and water-damaged bundle" that arrived at Sub Pop containing tapes of songs that were later "performed" by Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock. One has the feeling that this pretty legend is merely that.
Whether Ugly Casanova represents the gifted brilliance of Edgar Graham or the inspired expressions of Isaac Brock is immaterial in the end. Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Casanova is going to tell you a story of cool wind on dark roads, of ribbons of smoke, of rusted trains, of the hunched white spine of a mountaintop, of sunken ships and heat cupped in the palm of the sky.
Modest Mouse fans will feel at home here. There are the same coarse and hollow vocals, the rigid drums, the ready-steady march of the bass. But the Mouse's roar is missing. Even when Sharpen Your Teeth is loud it's somehow quiet. There's something dark and beautiful here, something lying in wait. An uneasiness. Brock is experimenting?with production (it's rich and clean and you can hear cold night and bright stars just outside the room); with sound (banjos and whistles and something that might be thick chain); with lyricism and his own abilities. You can hear what moves him, and at times a clear (but never too clear) influence?a hint of George Martin psychedelia in the vocal arrangements, Tom Waits' carnival creep, the sweet tobacco taste of Appalachian folk. Some songs are angry, some songs are sad, some songs are delicate and lacy and full of longing. All the songs are lovely.
Every moment on Sharpen Your Teeth can touch you somehow. A golden nostalgia hovers in the air around you as the music knits silky threads through your memories. Someday the songs will remind you of everything; of hot kisses and yellow grass and twilight and the smell of snow, and you'll keep playing them and never get sick of them.