Bucket Full of Teeth plays very loud, very angry, very fast songs. They are one of the bands that emerge from the break-up of Orchid, a brilliant band, or a band that became brilliant anyway. I was thinking of coining the phrase
blitz-core (a portmanteau of
blitzkreig and hardcore, essentially "lightning-core") but this isn't about Orchid--I'll save that for another day.
I assume the album is titled "IV" because it was their first full length after three vinyl-only EPs.
I was never able to get into this album, yet I always hoped that one day, I would be able to get into it.
This is one of the most alienating albums I own. Certainly not for the faint of heart, nor for anyone who is unaquainted with punishing music. Even I, a humble cultivar of extremity in music, was turned off to it at first.
To be sure, Bucket Full of Teeth more closely resembles their immediate ancestors than does good son Panthers, while still un-intentionally emphasizing that Orchid was truly more than the sum of its parts. Bucket Full of Teeth is Orchid, but without the romantic intellectualism. Sadly, this is one of the most endearing characteristics of Orchid, and what keeps one continually reaching back to their swan-song
Gatefold (though it was self-titled, I choose to refer to it thusly). Bucket Full of Teeth is Orchid with it's head cut off. This makes as much sense as anything, since Bucket Full of Teeth consists of the guitar-arm of Orchid, while bass, drums and vocals went to Panthers. To use an analogy that draws upon Futuarama, if the Nixon administration was the last gasp of lefist ideology to control the Whitehouse, Panthers is like the preserved head of Nixon, while Bucket Full of Teeth is the headless body of Spiro Agnew.
That is not to say though that IV is a bad album, but it is difficult. Thankfully Bucket Full of Teeth is not merely content to be a loud fast rules hardcore band. Like Orchid before them, there's the implied commitment to pushing the boundaries of what music can say and do. Their mission is decidedly much less overtly academic than was Orchid, likely owing to the departure of Jayson Greene on vocals, and this is one of the greatest hurdles to overcome if one is progressing from Orchid to Bucket Full of Teeth. For all of his pretentious romanticism (like the post-hardcore Morrisey) Greens vocals were always the highlight of an Orchid album, and despite the fact that the vocals feature significantly less prominently on IV, when you can make them out they sound like gutteral, inarticulate growls, and add nothing to the proceedings. The problem with music that borders on the violent is that it attracts a record number of retarded meatheads with no amount of sensitivity and emotional depth.
To conclude, and with brevity, IV is an album that takes a lot of listens, and it can be very rewarding, but I'm not trying to "evaluate" it in some sort of moralizing goodvsbad type way, merely to discuss the album. I don't feel like the album merits the amount of time I've put into writing this, what I'm sure some of you will quote, "critique", but it does warrant the effort of reading through this, as well as a few listens, if you're goal is to actually
listen to it, as opposed to just hearing it. Fuck it, I'm going home.
