Them Teeth have been active for more than a decade at this point and still haven’t been given their flowers, let alone the freshly picked deadly nightshade they rightly deserve. The mysterious duo had already ventured into the deepest innards of the shadowy Swedish woodlands by the time they recorded the material presented on Erstwhile and Auditory Witchcraft, they always seem to find new, even more darkness-soaked annals for their obscure sound-summonings: in the case of Sun of Serpent, Moone of Cipher the skins and strings were strung across a misty lagoon veined with slivers of lunar light; Illfänas, on the other claw, is described as “an untamed offshoot from the previously set path” of the past two records, seething and crackling with the heat of a bonfire that threatens to reduce the surrounding foliage to cinders at any moment. Raw, hypnotic rhythms have always featured prominently in the project’s sonic grimoire, but this LP elevates their presence to new heights, building each carefully structured and uniquely memorable track around pounding percussion rituals that channel both the metronomic throb of drone-rock triumphs like Outside the Dream Syndicate: Alive and Deux Lives and the supercharged Auvergnat folk music stylings of Toad. The more abstract elements of Them Teeth’s singular sound also reach new heights here—many of the meditative jams collapse or simply rot into stretches of harrowing electroacoustic dirge, leaves curling and branches blackening as the flames spread over all. It’s almost too easy to get completely lost in the outstretched arms of the forest, even as tracks like the superb closer “Du skola aldrig få hvila” prove that this is a concise and considered full-length (that also happens to be the band’s best yet).
Noise Not Music 