For those of you curious about the name, I'll spare you the suspense: listening to Experimental Dental School is indeed kind of like pulling teeth. That's not a 25-word dismissal, however: XDS revel in the difficult, the turgid, the painful. They've been called dance rock, but that isn't quite the right term for this Oakland trio-- "shake rock" might be more appropriate for their new album Jane Doe Loves Me, or maybe "seizure rock." Chaotic, constantly shifting rhythms teeter around, punctuated by furious organ lines, machine-gun samples, stutter-start flares from Jesse Hall's custom "guitar-o-bass," and gleefully shouted lyrical one-liners. Ryan Brundage's drum fiery drum work keeps the band on pace through their many time-signature shifts, bouncing from 4/4 to 3/4 to 12/8 to 13/8 with the fluidity of the hard prog the band seems to idolize.
The group skittered to a start, releasing Hideous Dance Attack!!!, also aptly-named, in 2003. Moving at a breakneck pace, Attack!!! took a page from fellow cross-Bay San Francisco contemporaries Deerhoof, except where Deerhoof make delicate use of space between instruments in the mix, XDS fill that space with a cacophony of furiously plonked organ riffs and busy drum fills. Jane Doe Loves Me is the group's third album and its most varied. The band's MySpace claims they spent 10 times on the album than on their previous two, and at times it shows. "Whale Drone" combines the jarring psychedelia of other conceptual cousins, Oneida and Captain Beefheart, with a buzzing duo of guitar-o-bass lines intertwining with a festive, swinging drumbeat. "Uh Huh – Na Uh" might even sound like a catchy psych-pop ballad, if it weren't for the synthesized screech bubbling under Horikawa's vocals. But too often, their offbeat identity gets the better of them. The grating juxtaposition of Horikawa's high-pitched organ with Hall's muddy guitar regularly dissolves into a messy homogeny, with only the aforementioned changes of pace acting as delimiters. All those rhythm changes and noises sound more busy than complex.
Listeners can often take or leave music of XDS's ilk while appreciating its merits, but good noisy rock sounds aggressive without fronting like it's trying to be noisy. Certainly Deerhoof and their obtuse compositions have earned a fair-sized audience. At their best (as on the opener "Jane Doe Loves Me"), Experimental Dental School make use of every weapon in their varied arsenal but bring a sort of sonic order from the mined battlefield of the mixing board. But more often, XDS always seem to teeter between the abyss of random noise for noise's sake, and the relative safety of tight, visceral aggression. Their inability to meld the two in more convincing fashion makes them far more attractive in concept than on the stereo.
