This will likely be the year remembered as the one that saw the mysterious erasure of the very real documentation of Teeth guitarist Brian Ashby’s very real black magic sorcery. The five minutes and six seconds that didn’t meet their end are chilling and haunting and nothing like the Philly band’s 2007 album You’re My Lover Now. Though overshadowed by Ashby’s extracurricular activities and the suspicious undoing of recorded footage of acts not meant for eyes nor faint hearts to see, the band’s debut full-length is a joyride through the annals of explosive and inventive garage rock and roll the way that it’s most assuredly meant to be down. These songs – of succinct demolition derby rattling, snappy and brilliant flings of observational writing and smart and buzzed harmonies – are 100-percent fetching. They talk about all of these girls who refuse to think with their melons (or do they?) and they get taken to the cleaners by all the dogs in town. Meanwhile, our heroes are turning their turbulent suffering into art that skirts around the house like a little kid in his underoos, trying to get out of taking a bath. Oh, they’re more mature than a scene like that, but now you’re interested and when you’re finished listening, 10 bucks says you’ll be on my poetic license-y side.

What this crazy site said about this record earlier in the year:
“The girls of which they speak on their excellent new record album You’re My Lover Now are ignoring our heroes in many instances and gallivanting with dudes completely wrong for them. There are many cases of the birds being blind as bats to the right guy for them. Molly, the poor sucker protagonist in the new album’s first song, is stuck in a relationship with a dickhead and she’s warned not to let the “devil get away,” but to make him pay severely for all of his sick, sick wrongdoing. She likely won’t and that’s what’s so sad. There are veiled references to casual, animalistic sex sprinkled, sure, but The Teeth think less with their crotches and more with the higher order thinking skills that allow for strikingly passionate lyricism, harmonies that are better for you than the recommended number of daily servings of fruits and vegetables and music that sounds as if it was really sweated for. Lead singer Peter MoDavis refers to himself and the band this way “Turtle, Monkey, Kitten and I” as if they’re cast members on “Entourage,” but they’re really just the pseudonyms of his twin brother Aaron, pirate-bearded Brian Ashby and drummer Jonas Oesterle, who is known to give packs of cigarettes as gifts. Happily, these four men allow their corrupted or bankrupt dealings with women to seep into these iconic, barreling songs that sprout from the untidiness of spontaneous urgings and wantonness. They can’t very well help themselves of these urges and what’s secreting from their pores, one gets to thinking. It would be like trying to scoop a flash flood up into your arms for a hug or a scolding or to transport it away so that some basements won’t get ruined. The Teeth could be an alternative energy source should ethanol be a bust.”

Daytrotter’s Best 15 Albums of 2007
15. John Vanderslice — Emerald City
14. The National — Boxer
13. These United States — The Forest and the Garden
12. The Teeth — You’re My Lover Now

The Teeth’s Daytrotter Session
The Teeth Official Site
Park the Van Records