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Mouse Fire - Wooden Teeth

Rating

RIYL

Controlling the Famous
Minus the Bear

Tracklist

1. Culvaria
2. Feel Good Drag
3. Comes Around Goes Around
4. Mexican Weather
5. To Celebrate a Suicide
6. The Unknown
7. Fear the Worst
8. Started a Fire
9. Chicago Aint the Answer
10. Friendship L
11. Flash Floods
12. This Is How I Throw My Slider

Mouse Fire’s debut album Wooden Teeth walks the line between insanely catchy and dull. While many of the songs are pulsating with fresh, jagged guitar lines and nice vocal hooks, many of them fall into the trappings of trying to expand their sound further than it can actually go. Near the beginning of the album, the band clutters their sound with ambient noise and static, overpowering the agreeable nature of the music. Songs like “Culvaria” and “Comes Around Goes Around” fall victim to this need to bloat their music, sounding uncharacteristic of the rest of the tracks on the album, making the pacing of the album a little hit or miss.

The highlight of the album is easily “To Celebrate a Suicide,” which has a guitar riff sounding surprisingly like The Libertines, although far more polished, giving way to a stiff bass line that structures most of the song. The song combines the melodic talents of the band, blending both the stellar vocal and guitar hooks the band has the potential to produce. The vocals are content to rely on the lyrics of the song to carry them, rarely having the voice raise its volume above a kind of casual hum, which lends nicely to the airy nature of the songs. While Mouse Fire should be taken seriously for both their content and musical ability, at their best, they sound relaxed, never trying to guide or trick their listeners into an emotional state, but letting them interpret the mood of the song for themselves.

Unfortunately, the album feels like something that you skip to the two or three stand out tracks, rather than consistently listening to it all the way through. Many of the songs get bogged down in either repetition or bloated production that detract from the songs themselves. Only a handful of songs really gain any richness or depth upon repeat listens, but those are definitely songs you should check out. Aside from “To Celebrate a Suicide,” the majority of the must-listen songs come at the end of the record including “Chicago Ain’t the Answer” and “This is How I Throw My Slider.” This awkward back loading of the album off-sets the pacing, making Wooden Teeth a hard album to sit through all the way.

--Matt McGraw