Cut Your Teeth--Cut Your Teeth

I've come to realize that hardcore is quickly becoming my favorite thing.  I always credit death metal to being my favorite thing, but death metal has a way of being all brutality and little substance.  Don't mistake me, now; I think substance is largely overrated.  But it's hard to find death metal bands that don't sound exactly like other bands, and even harder after that to find a death metal band whose songs get stuck in your head.  I like when a good song gets stuck in my head.  Hardcore is more stripped down, and therefore can't rely on tickling my Wank-Bone with excruciatingly technical riffing and angular solos.  They have to actually write a song, and that's a dying art form.

I first encountered Cut Your Teeth on Invisible Oranges; Cosmo Lee had just done a writeup about Bandcamp.com, which is a Myspace-killer site that forgoes the invasive "tidal wave of shitty bands friend requesting you" style in favor of "having a music player that actually plays music."  Cosmo invited us all to give shameless plugs of our stupid bands in the comments, and since I had just "finished" (read: gave up on) recording songs for my shitty, now defunct band, I posted a link.  I then became curious to see what other people who were nameless, faceless Interbung dweebs like me were up to on the music front.  Right above me was a post for Cut Your Teeth, a band from New York.  I went and checked them out and I loved everything I heard.

I congratulated the poster on his awesome band and downloaded what they had for free, which at this point was only one song.  Recently, Cosmo posted about Cut Your Teeth's music video, and I read that they had wised up and were giving away their self-titled EP for free.  Awesome.   I've been rocking it pretty steadily for the last week or so, and I can't get enough.

Cut Your Teeth are heavy.  Real heavy.  Their punk rock leanings become ridiculously apparent when you see a song called "Drink Beers" (fuck yeah), but they are more metal than punk.  Do they give my massive, veiny one-eyed D-yogurt slinger a good rubdown?  You'd better believe it!  But they don't limit themselves to just thundering through tracks with that most hallowed drumbeat; at turns, they grind, they get epic, they shred, and they challenge you to get wasted.  My kind of stuff, for sure.  The solos are massively shreddy and well-placed, and the breakdowns are tasteful without resorting to the "chugga chugga" style of metalcore halfwits like...pretty much all metalcore bands.  "Freight Train" gets epic with the midtempo swagger of bands that have dragons and shit on the covers of their albums, and "Problems" is greasy and slippery, like my fat, disgusting body emerging from a dip in my apartment complex swimming pool.  But in a good way.

The vocals utilize the "punk shout" screaming style from hardcore bands of yore, and is realistically the only "punk" element of the music.  Their overall sound is reminiscent of neo-crossover bands like Municipal Waste and Mantic Ritual (and a million other bands, really), but their sound is more heavy and thick.  "Drink Beers" is simultaneously lumbering and fast, like a giant elephant with rollerblades thundering across the African desert to go get elephant-wasted at some magical oasis.  I imagine there are also monkeys there, and they have a Jabberjaw-type band that sings about friendship.  And they all solve mysteries together.  After seeing all that on my computer screen, I realize that everything I learned about nature came from watching 70's era cartoons late at night on Cartoon Network, so none of that probably has ever happened.

I hate you, Jabberjaw.

But one can dream.

I'm glad to see that Cosmo is giving Cut Your Teeth as much attention as he is, and I hope that they will make some new music for me to get all boner-y over soon.  As for you, you should be going to their Bandcamp page to download for free some totally awesome hardcore.