Highly Deadly Black Tarantula could very well be the title of a long-forgotten B Movie: a sci-fi spectacle whose plot preys upon our primordial fears — and our inexplicable attraction to them.
Though Teeth of the Sea’s fourth record is devoid of any horror kitsch or cartoon gore, it is propelled throughout by a chilling and captivating psychic darkness, a kind of inverse transcendence that traverses the gradient between rumination, dread, and terror.
The London-based quartet released their debut, Orphaned By The Ocean, in 2010 to both acclaim and discordance — the thorny question of their genre affiliation couldn’t easily be resolved by critics. “Psychedelia” was the descriptor most often assigned to them, though it can’t possibly account for their audible Prog and Krautrock influences, or their erratic noise invocations.
Read the rest of the 8/10 review here: Line of the Best Fit
–
Teeth Of The Sea are one of those bands who are strictly an underground concern, yet release music which really should be heard by a wider public. Maybe it’s the sheer bloody mindedness of their music and the way they stick to their guns in doing only what they want to do, maybe it’s because they don’t really fit into any pigeon-hole genre. Maybe it’s simply that the wider public just aren’t ready for them yet and that, coupled in with a link up with the great Rocket Recordings, makes them one of the most vital bands on the planet right now.
Anyone who has heard the majestic drop that is ‘Responder’ from their last album, Master, will understand just what this band are capable of. Coming at the end of an album which defied genre specifications to be a weird hybrid of cinematic psych and electronica, it breached a hole in the hull of underground music and left an indelible imprint on year end lists. Teeth Of The Sea had arrived.
Read the rest of the 4/5 here: Artrocker
–
The announcement of a new Teeth of the Sea release is always a seismic event round these parts. I think it’s fair to say they’re a band that unites all four of us in effervescent delight having fan-gushed over their previous albums (here, here and here). With the news of Highly Deadly Black Tarantula a collective ‘Ye Gods! YES!’ could be heard in Manchester, London and Abu Dhabi.
If ‘classic TOTS’ is now a permissible phrase, opener ‘All My Venom’ is such. It feels like a nod to classics (yes, I can use that) such as ‘Swear Blind The Alsatian’s Melting’ as trumpet, guitars, drones, and beats build and weave. What amounts to the single from the album, ‘Animal Manservant’, is even more venomous than its predecessor, with vocals akin to a catatonic fit, macerating beats and the lightest of stargazing melodies. If Perc were to collab (as the kids call it) with Keith Emerson I think this would be the mutated, but nonetheless lovable, offspring...
Read the rest here: Both Bars on
---
