Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric old men: a legitimate redneck. Hailing from a rural logging town thirty miles east of Seattle, Brock grew up in a rusty trailer, doomed to the blue-collar nightmare of foundry life or some other back-breaking eternity. Over the past ten years, he's seen the backwoods town's tall pines and muddy soil swallowed alive by the corporate monster and shit back out as duplexes and strip malls. What little nature remains there now is permeated with the death stench of ChemLawr yards and Wendy's drive-thrus. So, after the success of Modest Mouse's classic The Moon and Antarctica, Brock packed up and moved to Cottage Grove, Oregon, another even more remote logging town-- one whose chances of becoming a suburban hellhole are about as likely as his mother's of winning a Powerball jackpot.
Brock is extremely candid in interviews about his love of drugs, particularly psychedelics and uppers. As everyone knows, there's not a lot to do out in nature but get high, and there's nothing like getting high in nature. It gets you thinking about the broader picture-- typical hippie shit like your place in the universe, and the usual depressive shit like your own mortality and irrelevance. This kind of environment can't be good for a guy who, beneath his surly exterior, is about as depressed as a motherfucker comes. But it helps him write, and when that's all you've got going for you, you go where it comes easiest.
I have little doubt that Brock wrote a great deal of the lyrics for The Moon and Antarctica on psychedelics, as many of his insights were so disconnected and profound that they could only have come to him in a moment of altered consciousness. But recently, including during the recording of that album, he's spent a lot of time in stone-sober Chicago, where psychedelics are considered hideously lower-class and drink is the drug of choice. None of this affected his magnum opus-- presumably because he was still hanging mostly with his druggy bandmates-- but Brock's solo debut as Ugly Casanova reeks of mental clarity, sacrificing the great philosophical lyrics of records past for pleasantly poetic, but never revelatory, subject matter.
Brock recorded Sharpen Your Teeth with Red Red Meat's Briar Deck, Califone's Tim Rutili, Pall Jenkins of Black Heart Procession, and a few random others at his Portland home studio, Glacial Pace, which he built using the advance Sub Pop offered him to record this very record. But let's consider his company here: Deck-- producer of the last Modest Mouse album and the first installment of Brock's Ugly Casanova side project-- for all his culvert reverb and glistening, interstellar software tricks, strikes me immediately as a man who has either never ingested a poisonous mushroom in his life or has long since outgrown such leanings. Rutili's work with Califone is marked by its junkyard percussion and Budweiser Americana. Jenkins sounds like he walks around in graveyards all day praying for inevitable death to just get it all over with. This is no company for abusing prescription tranquilizers.
But maybe that's the purpose of this project, to step away from the pursuit of universal knowledge and convey a simpler desperation. Or maybe he just wanted a new cast of characters to collaborate with. And this is indeed a collaboration. Though the songwriting-- which all members had a hand in, right down to the lyrics-- sounds unmistakably like Modest Mouse, you can hear the distinct marks of all the other players. It's initially evident on "Spilled Milk Factory," and later on "Pacifico," both of which feature clanging percussion and sparse background peripherals echoing Califone's Roomsound.
The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course, yields a few missteps, the worst of which stumbles backwards and breaks it neck: "Diamonds on the Face of Evil" is an awkwardly loping experiment in which Brock recites a few lines of nonsense padded with the ceaselessly hollered refrain of "shey shaw shey shaw!" Likewise, "Parasites" comes on like some absurd postmortem parade, with blaring synth trumpets and Isaac morbidly insisting that "the parasites are excited when you're dead/ Eyes bulging, entering your head/ And all your thoughts... THEY ROT!" "Ice on the Sheets" is, at 6\xBD minutes, repetitive and overlong, and "Bee Sting," though surely intended as a segue, hinders the flow of the album-- a tuneless interlude with Isaac offering some of the least thought-provoking lyrics of his career.
There are some damn fine moments here, though. Brock seems to have been born with an innate talent to impart the sourest dejection. His approach is more akin to Arlo Guthrie than to the mop-headed, crybaby adolescentry that presently dominates our rock. If he stuffed his shit with 75-cent dictionary finds, it'd be one thing, but he uses plain English to communicate complex meditations, analyses that could as easily be grasped by drunken farmhands as by world-class poets. The finest of these crops up on "Hotcha Girls," when Brock, at his most austere, sings, "Don't you know that you'll rust, and not belong so much, and then get left alone.../ Don't you know that old folks' home smells so much like my own."
The opener, "Barnacles," has Brock referencing classic Rolling Stones amidst antisocial daydreams: "I don't need to see/ I don't see how you see/ Out of your window/ I don't need to see, I'll paint it black." Then there's the killer two-song punch that ends the record: "Things I Don't Remember" recalls the very best upbeat and rhythm-oriented Mouse moments, with truly propulsive percussior hitting with ferocious thwacks, as if trying to better the Pixies' "U-Mass." When the song springs to life out of the pleasantly countrified "Smoke Like Ribbons," it hits with such caffeinated urgency that its surrealist lyrics actually become incredibly fun where they might otherwise have been fatally clumsy. This guides us to the reflective closer, "So Long to the Holidays," which evokes both wistful memories of past Christmases, and going off somewhere to die-- and with just two simple lyrics.
Sharpen Your Teeth was undoubtedly a therapeutic outing for Isaac Brock, giving him some time to recuperate from his band's definitive statement and temporarily alleviating the pressure of making the next one. And lucky for us, the final product fares far better than these things generally do. Rutili is an able guitarist and lyricist, as is contributor John Orth (who got his start in the Florida-based band Holopaw), and Brian Deck's production, though sometimes excessively spacy, is always warm and nicely balanced. That said, I'm looking forward to Brock falling back in with his old crowd. The drugs might not be good for him, but the inspiratior is.
