EP REVIEW: Swollen Teeth – Swollen Teeth
If you’ve ever suffered from gum disease, you’ll be familiar with the discomforting feeling of your teeth swelling up, of slow-bleeding decay every time you take a bite to eat or brush before bed. On their debut self-titled EP, masked stateside collective SWOLLEN TEETH distil this discomforting, disorienting and dehumanising sensation into five brain-damaging slabs of esotericism. Produced by SLIPKNOT’s Sid Wilson, SWOLLEN TEETH inject mid-00s metalcore with steroid-inducing doses of hardcore punk, industrial and nu-metal; they disintegrate the very DNA of metalcore, so much so that sustained vocal deliveries, slow-motion breakdowns, and syncopated scratching sound like you’re witnessing their music spontaneously combust before your eyes.
Opener Empty lays down the formula that flows through Swollen Teeth’s feeding tube; eerily off-setting feedback loops and field recordings echoing out, before your false sense of security is shot to pieces by your sleep paralysis demon chasing you through your dreams. All it takes is the debilitating sustained screams of “empty” for you to feel the same way you did when CODE ORANGE first came up; this is heavy metal, but not as you’ve ever known it.
There’s no denying Sid Wilson’s influence here; the sampling, the scratching, the Pulse Of The Maggots-aping riffs, the marching band percussion. But scratch beyond the surface, dig a little deeper into Swollen Teeth’s chaos, and you’ll find a stateside rival for HERIOT. Sure, there’s a formula, but it never falls into familiar territory.
Car Crash deals out neck-snapping breakdowns like its breaking into a bank with a battering ram, whilst Bike Ride is a well-timed jump scare straight from a 70s B-movie horror; 50 seconds of looping minimalism lets you drift off into mindlessness, before obliterating your senses with drummer Skutch’s shotgun blast-beats. Elsewhere, the title track combines disorienting distortion with a rhythm section designed to bludgeon your brain until you’re straw-feeding yourself, the haunting dual-vocal harmonies of Megaa and Sun coalescing into concussive chaos, scratching below the surface of the mix trying to break free.
SWOLLEN TEETH say little, preferring to slowly drive home lines of repetition, written more like poetry than songs; ultimately, it plays in their favour. With every note of their music an assault on the senses, hearing a line like “which one of us is next” over and over and over like a monkey with a miniature cymbal is goosebump-inducing. It’s your nightmare to inhabit, where you’re both predator and prey simultaneously, hunting yourself into your own conclusions.
Closer Crooked is a sensational, synapse-snapping slab of bone-shatteringly good metal. Chirping crickets get burnt alive by the poisonous pesticide of percussive oblivion; overlapping dual vocals drill into your eardrums like they’re digging for gold; and the unrelenting, unforgiving lament of “you will never want to be me” leaves you crying in a corner. If this doesn’t bulldoze festivals, we’ll eat our hat.
In five tracks, SWOLLEN TEETH achieve what so many bands strive to do in five albums: prove they’re the real deal. Whilst they don’t always reinvent the wheel as much as perfect it, if this is what their debut EP sounds like, the future of metal is in very safe hands.
Rating: 9/10
Swollen Teeth is set for release on April 26th via Blowed Out Records.
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