Teethe

Before there was Teethe, there were other acts and assorted solo projects, all outlets for the four people who would eventually become a single band to write and record songs of their own. In Denton, Texas, a little more than a half-decade ago, the music scene gradually did what any good one should do: connected people with shared interests and sensibilities and encouraged them in turn to push, collectively, a bit further. For Teethe, the dual nexuses were house shows and a mutual enthusiasm for home recording. Four songwriters began to share once-siloed works, rounding out one another’s drafts until they’d steadily but casually built a record—Teethe’s 2020 self-titled debut, a loose and warm 12-track collage of exquisite existential blues and twilit harmonies. Their expectations were modest, but a few early cassette runs slowly led to several sold-out vinyl editions, unlikely name-drops from mega-stars, and several tours across the United States and Europe. Born of living-room jams and DIY spaces, Teethe seemed to stumble toward success on a path they proudly made themselves. Magic Of The Sale represents Teethe’s natural next step: a second album, a record label, a slew of guests who represent their Texas roots and new friends they’ve made in recent years. Still, Teethe took special care to preserve the part of the process that made their debut so special, eliding an outside producer or any single strategy to instead let its four songwriters write and record by themselves in upgraded home studios before letting a cadre of collaborators add their own ideas. It is an end-around for industry expectations, from a band that never had any expectation of them. The results represent a magnificent and rare accomplishment: a record not only where the homemade sounds as rich and full as any other record you may hear this year but also where four distinct songwriters, singers, and stylists ask a series of interlocked questions. What is it to build an identity and life for yourself in a time of shared collapse? What does it mean to exist and love right now? What does it mean to balance the needs you have with the desires of those who shape your experience, too? Magic Of The Sale is a sad and beautiful self-built world of Southern slowcore, where four people who have become confidants turn toward one another and drift forward, together. It feels important to pause here and mention where the members of Teethe came from, to show some of the intersections that helped make their debut and now Magic Of The Sale feel so cohesive. A decade ago, not long after Teethe founder Boone Patrello began his band Dead Sullivan, he met Madeline Dowd during their earliest days at the University of North Texas. She started a band, Crisman, and then joined the group of Grahm Robinson, MAH KEE OH, for a tour alongside Dead Sullivan. After Jordan Garrett joined Dowd’s Crisman in 2019, the four people who would soon become Teethe were effectively interconnected. They played with one another in living rooms after their other bands finished practice and tinkered with reel-to-reel experiments, the stakes as low as any hangout but the connection high. If all those band names and rendezvous points along the way get confusing, just remember: They allowed the then-inchoate Teethe to connect without pressure or expectation, to discover the language they soon captured so elegantly. Since they made their debut, their toolkits have expanded, literally and metaphorically. They’ve boosted their gear and home studios, plus their understanding of how to make rhythm tracks cut on old tape work with layers then rendered on the computer. (Robinson and Patrello have, in particular, become adept and eager engineers.) To begin recording Magic Of The Sale together but separately, they worked in rooms now spread between Dallas and Austin. They uploaded demos, bits, and pieces to a shared folder—a spare guitar idea here, a rhythmic foundation there, even some fully fledged songs. Other members added parts or lyrics as these things appeared. As if sharing something that’s not quite finished weren’t already a vulnerable process, they upped the ante by sending the tracks to an incredible cast of collaborators—Xandy Chelmis of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, Charlie Martin of Hovvdy, Logan Hornyak of Melaina Kol and several other veteran musicians around the country. Teethe asked many of them to play what they heard and felt, while still more musicians (including cellist Emily Elkin, who has played with the likes of Japanese Breakfast and Angel Olsen) cut string and wind parts Patrello had composed. Patrello took all of it and, over four painstaking months, edited it into a whole. He mixed the results by himself at home, once again funneling several visions into one complete picture. Magic Of The Sale is sad-eyed and gorgeous, its songs as beautiful and troubled as the sky of the Texas desert at sunset while a storm creeps across the horizon. There’s “Push You Forever,” where pedal steel sighs beneath honeyed vocals and drifting drums; it’s a hangdog hymn about being caught in the illusions we create about our past and present, or the things we do to feed our identity but that, in turn, may trap us. As full of ache and anxiety as Sparklehorse and Low, “Iron Wine” addresses how we exploit each other in order to live, how we find the resource we need in someone else and extract it until they, too, collapse. It is whispered here like an admission, a haunted lullaby. And “Hate Goodbyes” is a preemptive apology for the wreckage we leave behind simply by virtue of existing, of tending to ourselves. “If I disappoint you, you have every right,” it goes, cello curling around crestfallen guitars in this broken country moan. Teethe does not sit still for Magic Of The Sale, expanding and amplifying their sonic possibilities in ways that often feel like exclamation marks. There’s the tense and magnetic title track, where emphatic harmonies reinforce the shared turmoil that defines the song. Pain is rarely ours to bear alone, Patrello and Dowd seem to say as they trade verses and support. “Holy Water” is now the most aggressive song in Teethe’s catalogue, the sharp guitar line and feedback swells buoying Dowd’s smart contemplation of the ways we look for help as we age, of our belief that salvation is always on the way. It is a proclamation of independence and interdependence. Dowd painted the cover of Teethe’s first album, the confused look on the character’s face warped with worry and distorted by drips of pigment that suggest green tears. A similar figure reappears on the cover of Magic Of The Sale, again painted by Dowd. But that grimace of endless exhaustion is gone. Clad in red and caught mid-stride, they look more like a jester, a cool curiosity splashed across their face as they stand in an archway to welcome you to the vast world of uncharted land and sky just in the distance. That is how Teethe feels and sounds throughout Magic Of The Sale—newly confident but still full of questions about the unknown, about what comes next. Magic Of The Sale is a soft but steely record about the worst quandaries we can encounter, from being trapped by an existence we didn’t entirely create to the hell that other people can be. Having emerged nearly fully formed from a long-overlooked pocket of Texas’ musical wealth, Teethe make all that heaviness feel a little lighter to lug.