The University Of North Texas is a huge public research school that has a funny way of feeling like a small liberal arts college sometimes. When people ask me what it was like being a student there 10 years ago, I tend to tell them one of two stories: the time I wrote about a block-wide house show “festival” for the school paper, or the time I drunkenly scaled a fence to flee a DIY steel drum ensemble gig as the cops shut it down. Denton, Texas is close enough to Dallas that you can forge the hour-long drive to catch a touring band coming through Deep Ellum if you really want to, but I certainly didn’t need to in order to get my live music fix. Everybody was either in a band or knew somebody in one. There wasn’t exactly a revolution happening in Denton in the mid-2010s, but when I was 19, that understated counterculture felt as close as I could get to being in DC in 1986 or Olympia in 1991.
Teethe’s sophomore album Magic Of The Sale, out this Friday, might be the most Denton-sounding record I’ve heard since graduating from UNT. Back then, the band’s Boone Patrello, Grahm Robinson, Madeline Dowd, and Jordan Garrett were each performing in other bands or solo projects; Dowd was making stripped-down folk with her project Crisman, whose live lineup came to include her school friend Patrello, founder of the gauzy slowcore band Dead Sullivan. The four future bandmates connected via the sweaty, cigarette-sullied spaces they mutually occupied and their similar tastes, eventually bringing snippets of their songwriting to each other, collaboratively fleshing out ideas and cobbling them together to create a whole album. Having practically stumbled into forming an entirely new band, they decided to call themselves Teethe, and released that music as a self-titled LP in 2020.
Teethe didn’t expect much reception from that first album, especially having released it around the same time that COVID vaccines were becoming readily available. But that absence of outside pressure gave way to a promising collage of Southern-tinged slowcore, 12 no-frills songs that showcased Teethe’s innate sense of melody and penchant for atmospheres and earning them a loyal following at home. Almost five years later, the follow-up Magic Of The Sale is indicative of the type of progression you’d hope to see from a band like Teethe, a natural level-up that loses none of that gritty spirit. Their arrangements evoke sleepy indie heroes like Bedhead and Low, not reinventing the wheel but expanding upon an already-solid blueprint.
Like Teethe, the earliest iterations of Magic Of The Sale’s songs came remotely, though the band members have since noticeably upgraded their gear and audio engineering chops. They recorded demos in their respective current home bases across Dallas and Austin and uploaded them to a shared folder. Those two cities aren’t too far away by Texas standards, but you can feel a distant longing in songs like the fuzzed-out “Funny”: “I think it’s funny how you walk away from her/ Yeah, it’s so funny how you live in your own world,” Patrello sings over plinking piano keys, a restrained resentment poking through the sarcasm. But that long, open road goes both ways, as Robinson addresses a couple of songs later on the funereal “Hate Goodbyes”: “If I disappoint you/ You have every right,” he sings, relinquishing the decision of what he deserves.
In the years since their debut, Teethe have not only become more musically confident and consistent, but their communal web has grown far beyond Texas. Much like how the members sent each other early iterations of songs, they also sent tracks-in-progress to a number of outside guests, giving many of them free reign to add whatever elements they saw fit. Charlie Martin of fellow Texan folk-rockers Hovvdy performs additional piano throughout the album; Xandy Chelmis of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman strums that warm, familiar pedal steel on almost every song; and producer Logan Hornyak of Melaina Kol contributes a welcome dose of distortion to highlights like “Iron Wine,” “China Day,” and the title track. Patrello composed the melodies for cellist Emily Elkin, who grounds the album’s themes of troubled interpersonal relationships in a refreshingly gentle tone on songs like “Ammo”: “Hit ’em in the nose where it hurts the most/ Told you I don’t mess around” feels much less aggressive when delivered so solemnly.
It’s telling that some of the guests on Magic Of The Sale appear not just once or twice, but on at least half of the album’s songs. On tape, Teethe sound more like a collective nowadays than a typical four-piece, striking a pleasant balance between the pared-down nature of the slowcore genre and the vividness of their instrumentation: “Go back to when you were a daredevil/ Back to when you first learned to pedal,” Dowd sings on the album’s heaviest track “Holy Water,” her featherlight coo highlighting juxtaposing muscular electric guitar chords. But Teethe’s strengths are perhaps most evident on Magic Of The Sale’s title track, which makes most other songs labeled “cinematic” or “sprawling” pale in comparison as a mid-tempo chug bolsters sweeping, goosebump-inducing orchestral strings. “I wanna see you try/ Like you could do better,” Patrello sings with utter defeat, as if begging on his knees. Teethe succeed in deploying those contrasts, where anger and sadness are intertwined and those vehement emotions are tethered in placid composition. Like doing 80 on a monotonous Texas interstate, Magic Of The Sale celebrates those blips of chaos while still embracing the calm.
Magic Of The Sale is out 8/8 via Winspear.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Ethel Cain’s Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
• Ada Lea’s When I Paint My Masterpiece
• For Those I Love’s Carving The Stone
• Roc Marciano & DJ Premier’s The Coldest Profession
• Machine Gun Kelly’s Lost Americana
• Anamanaguchi’s Anyway
• No Joy’s Bugland
• OSEES’ Abomination Revealed At Last
• Amaarae’s BLACK STAR
• Wombo’s Danger In Fives
• J.I.D.’s God Does Like Ugly
• Young Nudy’s Paradise
• Phil Elverum & Arrington de Dionyso’s GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND
• The Black Keys’ No Rain, No Flowers
• Halestorm’s Everest
• Field Medic’s Surrender Instead
• Jonas Brothers’ GREETINGS FROM YOUR HOMETOWN
• Charley Crockett’s Dollar A Day
• Big Freedia’s Pressing Onward
• Blackbraid’s Blackbraid III
• Old Sea Brigade’s If Only I Knew (Pt. 2)
• Bad Suns’ Accelerator
• The Thing’s The Thing
• Chris Staples’ Don’t Worry
• Tom Gershwin’s Wellspring
• Lydia Night’s Parody Of Pleasure
• alice does computer music’s Bliss
• Jake Winstrom’s RAZZMATAZZ!
• David Franklin Courtright’s Brutal Tenderness
• Sinsaenum’s In Devastation
• Asunojokei’s Think Of You
• Ashley Monroe’s Tennessee Lightning
• Gordi’s Like Plasticine
• Bailey Zimmerman’s Different Night Same Rodeo
• Lew Apollo’s Fool’s Gold
• Dreamwake’s The Lost Years
• Galaxie 500’s CBGB 12.13.88 live album
• Mechatok’s Wide Awake
• Matteo Pagamici & Michael Künstle’s DIMENSIONS
• Animals In Exile’s Animals In Exile
• Siichaq’ Catcher
• Good Charlotte’s Motel Du Cap
• MUNNYCAT’s til death we do art
• MALTHUSIAN’s The Summoning Bell
• Hayes Carll’s We’re Only Human
• Chicago’s CHICAGO IX: GREATEST HITS EXPANDED
• Jonathan Mortiz Trio Secret Tempo’s Love You to Death
• Morgan James’ Soul Remains The Same
• Isaia Huron’s Concubania
• Humour’s Learning Greek
• Cold Chisel’s The Big Five-0 Live Live Album
• THEURGION’s All Under Heaven
• Malcolm Todd’s Malcolm Todd (Still)
• T. Hardy Morris’ Artificial Tears
• Filter’s The Algorithm: Ultra Edition
• ShrapKnel’s Saisir Le Feu
• Primitive Impulse’s Piss It Away
• Opin’s Embrace The Grift
• Will Gregory’s Lost In The Forest: Music from the RSC’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Vitamin String Quartet’s VSQ Performs BLACKPINK
• Jenevieve’s CRYSALIS
• Chuckyy’s I Live, I Die, I Live Again (Resurrected)
• Peter Gabriel’s Live at WOMAD 1982
• Tommy Richman’s Worlds Apart EP
• Westside Cowboy’s This Better Be Something Great EP
• Rhea Raj’s COMMOTION EP
• MyVeronica & Friend’s House’s Farewell Skylines EP
• Kaash Paige’s KAASHMYCHECKS EP
• MyVeronica & Friend’s House’s Farewell Skylines Split EP
• Crypt Sermon’s Saturnian Appendices EP
