The image of a "roomful of teeth" is either gruesome or whimsical, depending on your perspective; it could evoke a blood-soaked Saw outtake or a children's book illustration. Roomful of Teeth, the vocal octet, seem to be going for a little of both. The group, led by conductor, composer, and singer Brad Wells, are interested in the places where the human voice is stretched to extremes, and they've gone to great lengths to study all the wildest sounds it can make: Inuit throat singing, Korean p'ansori singing, yodeling. All of these and more can be found on their self-titled, Kickstarter-financed debut album: Filled with whoops, ululations, grunts, and chattering cries, the album is violent, but in an ingratiating kind of way.
Their name nicks a line from the old Bing Crosby/Bob Hope picture Road to Morocco, a breezily nonsensical slapstick travelogue filled with bumbling sheiks and talking camels. You might be tempted to infer some sort of cultural appropriation in-joke from the reference, but the only thing the group and the movie share is a freewheeling, madcap spirit. "Montmartre", by Judd Greenstein, veers between cartoony "neener-neener" solfège singing and Meredith Monk-ish chatters to breathy flutters. "Amid the Minotaurs", by composer and New Amsterdam co-founder William Brittelle, begins as an ersatz jazz madrigal and ends with a gloriously ludicrous, Lita Ford-style power ballad finale. As a composer, Brittelle is heroically unafraid of flirting and occasionally consummating the relationship with bad taste, and "Amid The Minotaurs", like his 2010 AOR prog-rock suite Television Landscape, has the nervy throwdown feel of an aesthetic dare.
Many pieces on Roomful of Teeth deal with the idea of overlapping chatter and information overload. On "Passacaglia", one of four pieces by composer and ensemble member Caroline Shaw scattered across the record, singers chant technical jargon-- "The 86th, 87th, and 88th points are located symmetrically across the central vertical axis of the wall"-- in sedate, friendly-stewardess tones over a luminous background of "oohs," channeling the supermarket Zen of Einstein on the Beach. The voices blur together, mimicking the feeling of being marooned among competing conversations at a cocktail party. The grunts, breaths and vocalizations of Shaw's "Courante", meanwhile, start off somewhere vaguely sexual, and end up feeling like raindrops hitting a window, just another auditory input in a world overflowing with them.
Roomful of Teeth often perform live with Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-yArDs, and she has such a natural rapport with the group that she almost seems like a lost member of their gathering. She contributes two choral works here, both drawing on non-Western singing styles: "Quizassa" is heavily influenced by the singing of the Bulgarian Women's Choir and might make some listeners think of the keening, sour vocal harmonies of Dirty Projectors. (In fact, anyone curious about what that band's vocal techniques sound like when elongated might be interested in Roomful of Teeth.) Her other piece, "Ansa Ya", concludes the album, and features a mesmerizing, skirling vocal stutter effect I don't have the vocabulary or knowledge to even identify. It's exhilarating, though, and like most of Roomful of Teeth, it will send an unnameable thrill down your spine.
