Cut Your Teeth--CYTII

The interbung has revolutionized several aspects of our lives, some for the better, and some for the worse.  Example: most bands can't make an actual living playing music anymore.  We all know that stealing music is fun and easy, and I'm not going to preach one way or the other about the merits of supporting bands monetarily versus being able to listen to anything at any time.  Bo-ring!  On the same token, however, the Interhole has destroyed the necessity for great bands to have a label for non-local fans to be listening to them.  Enter Cut Your Teeth, New York's crossover kings, and perhaps the single band that I spend the most time listening to and writing up for this crappy website of mine (don't believe me?  Here, here, this current post, etc).

I credit myself personally with being Cut Your Teeth's first fan ever.  I know that's delusional and retarded, but if you read my first writeup, you'll notice that Patrick Lukens (I think) and I were shamelessly plugging, on Invisible Oranges, Cut Your Teeth and my not-actually-a-band band.  I went and listened to CYT first thing and was blown away.  There, for some reason I retold that story.  You're welcome.

Now, for the uninitiated, Cut Your Teeth are the original New York party worms.  They wear Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses round the clock I imagine, and they subsist solely on beer or other party-related beverages, many of them served with colorful umbrellas.

Four Loko made me do it, bitches!  Now LET'S PARTY!

 

Cut Your Teeth are the kind of band that you'd like to have playing your house party.  They're all about bringing the thunder and swilling things, and are the kind of band that would lead somebody to set your couch on fire in a well-intentioned but misguided show of enthusiasm for your sweet house party.

Such a hangover everybody would have the next day!

CYTII is an admirable--if poorly named--continuation of the band's first release, Cut Your Teeth.  To placate myself while I walk to work and stuff, I like to put both albums on back-to-back; it gives me the comforting illusion that there's one quite good and pretty-much-long-enough album rather than admitting that it's actually two that are too short to truly quench my thirst for songs about booze and telling women to fuck off.  There's something about Cut Your Teeth's brand of crossover thrash that really gets my heart pumping.  I suspect it has something to do with the massive D-boner strokeage inherent in most of their songs; there's also a nostalgia factor at play, since Cut Your Teeth would have been my group of friends' favorite band when I was in high school.  They'll have to settle for being one of my favorite bands now that I'm considerably older and crustier than I used to be.  Sorry guys.

Song wise, CYTII is a more than adequate match for their first EP; tasty riffs abound in songs like "Bum Wine and Tequila" and "T.W.H.W.Y.T.B."  Sweet solos are also readily available for those of us who are guitar obsessed fret-watchers; I once read in a writeup that Cosmo Lee of Invisible Oranges did that said he suspected Patrick Lukens of being a closet shredder.  Really?  I suspect Cosmo Lee is a closet writer, and that all this summer heat is coming from that big-ass bright thing what flies across the sky during the daytime.

Perhaps Cut Your Teeth's finest achievement with this new album, however, is "Stallion" and it's accompanying music video.  Do I think "Stallion" is the best song they've ever written?  No, but it's really good.  However, they've made a music video for it, and I can say with a high degree of certainty that it's the only music video I've watched all the way through in probably about 10 years.  I love headstock cameras and dizzying movement, and the video is ripe with those things.  Watch:

I've been piping on about these dudes for a while now.  If you've missed the boat up until now, I insist you stop being a turd and go download their albums, because they rule and are free.  Check out their Bandcamp page if you don't believe me.

And thank you, interwebbies.  Even though you distract me from doing important things with my life, you also distract me from reality, which is way better than being productive.