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Cotton Teeth

The Snake the Cross the Crown
Equal Vision Records

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The Snake the Cross the Crown - Cotton Teeth There's only one type of authenticity that really matters. It's not the kind that demands that you stay true to a particular music scene, nor is it the kind of thing that demands a nearly religious adherence to long-withered musical traditions. It's staying true to your own calling.

The Snake the Cross the Crown breaks a three-year dry spell with Cotton Teeth to show it's well aware with the authenticity that counts. Ditching the post-emo sounds of its first two albums, the Huntsville, Al. band doesn't just retool its sound, it rebuilds it from the ground up according to nobody's blueprint but its own, pulling heavily from country, folk and roots and mashing them together with the rugged individualism that's the calling card of the punk underground for generations. And while the product -- sort of a jimmy-rigged cross between Grandaddy and Neil Young -- is the sort of thing that everyone who harps all the wrong kinds of authenticity (punk-rock fanboys and Americana purists) will hate, the band's set to finally come into its own.

Cotton Teeth finds the band reveling in its authentically inauthentic Americana, The Snake the Cross the Crown is still a little enamored with its newfound style to make more than a giddy introduction to its roots-ready mix of keyboards, acoustic guitar and rock dynamics. "The Great American Smokeout" wrestles an unassuming acoustic guitar figure and easygoing vocal melody on top of a more sophisticated piano-pop base, for a sound that's stuck between alt-country and alt-rock. Most of the band's songs aren't quite as cut and dried, however. In "Gypsy Melodies," "Hey Jim" and "Back to the Helicopter," the band finds a back-porch familiarity that belies the indie-rock eccentricities that bubble beneath its home-fried surface, like a less urbane Modest Mouse or a young and innocent Grandaddy.

It's a bold move for the band, one that came after a lot of soul-searching, practice-room experiments and cancelled tours. And while The Snake the Cross the Crown reestablished themselves as free-spirit indie-roots rockers, it's going to take an album a little stronger than the lukewarm Cotton Teeth to prove the act's true-to-itself sound is worth anyone else's attention.

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I almost 100% agree with this review, but I don't think they entirely ditched their sound. Just refined and retooled it a lot. You can hear roots of Mander Salis in this, I think. This is way better though.
posted by Josh Voland on Mar 22, 2007

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Cotton Teeth

The Snake the Cross the Crown Equal Vision Records

The Snake the Cross the Crown
Equal Vision Records