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Friday Full-Length: Dark Tooth Encounter, Soft Monsters

Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 26th, 2024 by JJ Koczan

Dark Tooth Encounter‘s Soft Monsters was released in 2008 through Lexicon Devil, and is one of any number of projects in the oeuvre of guitarist Gary Arce of Yawning Man, who around this period was also collaborating with UK prog instrumentalists Sons of Alpha Centauri as Yawning Sons for the first time, as well as getting Yawning Man together as a touring act — they’d release Nomadic Pursuits (review here) in 2010 and enter more of a traditional-band existence rather than the vague-desert-legend status they’d enjoyed prior — demoing with Big Scenic Nowhere, who are now a real band much different than that demo, jamming with Ten East for the first two LPs in 2006 and 2008, collaborating with Hotel Wrecking City Traders out of Australia, on and on. I think even the Zun demo happened right around then too.

Arce‘s not exactly hard up for projects these days either, between Yawning Man actively releasing and touring, Yawning Balch bringing a similar lineup plus Bob Balch of Fu Manchu for two LPs in 2023, and a new LP on the way next week from Big Scenic Nowhere, which also has Arce and Balch paired, and whose drummer, Bill Stinson, also plays on Dark Tooth Encounter‘s Soft Monsters and holds the jams together in both Yawning Man (until last year) and the two Yawning Balch albums.

And I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think Stinson was in Yawning Man circa 2008 (original drummer Alfredo Hernandez played on Nomadic Pursuits), but Yawning Man also weren’t as active as they would be a few years after the fact, so while I’m not sure exactly how Dark Tooth Encounter happened, it might just have been a step-aside for Arce to work with Stinson alongside Ten East, whose second album, The Robot’s Guide to Freedom, surfaced concurrent to Soft Monsters.

Is that weird? Well, a little, but listening to Dark Tooth Encounter, it makes a little more sense since the mission on Soft Mirrors — seven songs/39 dark tooth encounter soft monstersminutes, as if “ready for LP reissue” could be an actual runtime — is also a bit of a sidestep from either Yawning Man or Ten East. Mario LalliFatso Jetson, Yawning Man, lately Mario Lalli and the Rubber Snake Charmers and the Brant Bjork Trio — sits in on bass for centerpiece “Radio Bleed,” but handles guitar on side A’s “Weeping Pines” and the finale “Engine Drone,” both of which have a subtle touch of the West Coast speaking to the East as regards ideas of ‘Southern’ in rock, Lalli and Arce‘s guitars allowing different textures to take hold than in, say, even the melancholy layers of keys and guitar in the penultimate “Hyper Air,” which feels prescient of All Them Witches in its full-room spaciousness, or opener “Alloy Pop,” wherein Arce (on guitar and bass) and Stinson (on drums and more drums, but always with class and a willingness to rest in a part while the guitar fleshes out) set the course for what Soft Monsters will be.

Part of that, as with most of Arce‘s work, comes from post-rock and post-punk more than the psychedelic subset of heavy with which Yawning Man are often lumped. Dark Tooth Encounter offers this with a feel that’s more worked on and structured, while still instrumental — though, is that a yell in the fade of “Alloy Pop?” did someone turn on a table saw? — giving a sense of the jams likely to have spawned the material in the first place but at the same time building more on top of those jams and refining them to be ‘songs’ in a verse/chorus sense; Arce is no stranger to proliferating instrumental hooks, and Dark Tooth Encounter takes advantage of its opportunities to showcase that in “Honey Hive,” with Stinson‘s snare accenting the rhythm of the guitar or the psych-jazz of “Deep Sleep Flower,” with Arce on keyboard, bass and lap steel in addition to standard guitar, the necessary layering process of which has me wondering which was recorded first, the bass or guitar.

Either way, “Deep Sleep Flower” resonates with more tonal heft than much of Soft Monsters, and that seems to be by design. Compared to the spaces left between the slow strums of “Weeping Pines,” on which Scott Reeder (currently Sovereign Eagle; see also KyussFireball Ministry, The ObsessedGoatsnake, and Across the River with Mario Lalli and Alfredo Hernández [also later of Kyuss], who were kind of a precursor to Yawning Man and desert rock more generally in the mid-1980s; the Across the River demo tape is the stuff of legend) takes up bass as Lalli moves to guitar.

Reeder also contributed to Ten East. Nobody’s a stranger here, and nobody sounds like one. That’s to the advantage of Soft Monsters generally, since as an instrumental offering it’s inherently going to benefit from the chemistry between the players involved; to be found in ample supply through “Radio Bleed” at the album’s center, spacey and weirdo proggy and so irrevocably desert hued in no small part because Arce and company have set those associations forward in the genre to start with. Maybe it’s a footnote or a one-off, but one might have said the same thing until just a few years ago about Big Scenic Nowhere, and that band came to be something completely different than when the name first showed up.

So maybe at some point there will be another Dark Tooth Encounter, but I’d expect if so, at least if it were to happen somewhere amid Arce‘s already-detailed list of current projects — which I’m just going to go out on a limb and say is incomplete — it would also take a different form than on Soft Monsters, since ArceLalli and Stinson spent most of the 2010s as Yawning Man. But one never knows — anything, ever — and neither Stinson nor Lalli are ‘in’ Yawning Man at the moment, so perhaps bringing Dark Tooth Encounter back in some form at some point would be a way to reignite that collaboration among the many others all these players past and present. You won’t hear me predict. You will hear me recommend this one for a Yawning Man or hypnotic-instrumental fan looking for a fix or a post-rocker looking for a bridge to something of heavier tonal presence. In other words, as always, I hope you enjoy.

Thank you for reading.

If you tuned in last Friday, you probably caught the bit at the end where I talked about my laptop getting busted. Kid fell off the side of the couch — she runs on furniture when she gets an idea; it’s not something we encourage, but it’s something we live with, because theoretically you want a kid to be excited about ideas and movement is part of how she processes things intellectually and emotionally — and landed on my computer while also dumping my full iced tea cup on the same computer. Somehow she didn’t get wet, I assume because all the tea actually went inside the laptop, as if by now-is-the-time-for-this-thing-to-die magic.

A week later, I have perspective enough to see it could’ve been much worse. The Pecan wasn’t hurt; that’s always a plus. The laptop was going on six years old; it had a cracked case, couldn’t run unplugged, keys got stuck, on and on. Crucially — this is the one that makes it okay — the repair guy I use (TelStar Computers, Denville, NJ; a local small business I’m glad to support) was able to save the data on the hard drive, so I have that ready to go. From there, the hardest part has been accepting that because I’m using our own money rather than glut from the life-affirming crowdfunding campaign that got me that now-ex-laptop after I was robbed in the UK in 2018, I have to settle for a smaller screen with less desktop real estate to organize records, and give up an internal optical drive along with other bells and whistles. Still, a new laptop will allegedly be here on Tuesday, and I can’t look that gift horse in the mouth. I am privileged to be able to get another computer at all — the emergency backup Chromebook I call ‘Little Red’ is fine to visit, but nowhere I want to live — and I thank The Patient Mrs. for her getting-my-ass-in-gear efforts and her price-comparison research. My new one will be a Lenovo, which somehow makes me feel like a businessman. Expect copious corporatespeak, all synergisms and disruptional action assets and whatnots.

But this was kind of a bumpy, by-the-seat-of-my-pants week and I guess I made it through. I have a bio project for a death metal band (frickin’ a) to bang out this afternoon, so I’m going to leave it there and go immerse myself for a little bit in pummeling, bludgeoning extremity, and that’ll be a lot of fun I have no doubt.

Monday, a Sundrifter premiere. Tuesday I think a full-album stream for The Black Flamingo, though I need to check that. Wednesday I’m doubled up with premieres for Goat Major and a full-album stream for Troy the Band. Thursday is a full-album stream for Kariti, and next Friday I want to review the Guhts record, though it might be Monday, Feb. 5, before I get there. Either way, that’s what’s in my notes for next week, plus news posts, other videos that come up and whatever else catches the eye.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. We’re in Connecticut tomorrow and are having company (like a double-playdate/brunch? oof, adulthood) on Sunday, so it’ll be busy, but I’m around if anyone needs me for anything. Don’t forget to hydrate, watch your head, all that stuff.

FRM.

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Yawning Sons are Worthy of Ceremony

Posted in Reviews on June 30th, 2009 by JJ Koczan

Pretty.You can make whatever sound comparisons or analogies you want, to my ears, the debut from Yawning Sons is principally two things. First: mesmerizing. Second: warm. The band is end result of a fortunate ocean-crossing collaboration between Californian desert rock legend Gary Arce of Yawning Man and the UK?s Sons of Alpha Centauri. Presumably they went with Yawning Sons because ?Arce & Sons? sounded too much like they were electricians. In any case, their debut, Ceremony to the Sunset, released by Australia?s Lexicon Devil, is seven cuts of mostly instrumental experimental post-rock psychedelic hypnosis, with guest vocal spots from Fatso Jetson?s Mario Lalli, Wendy Rae Fowler (Mark Lanegan Band) and Scott Reeder spread throughout to act as trail markers.

The story goes that Arce and the four-piece Sons of Alpha Centauri had never met before he flew to the UK to produce a record for them, but when he arrived they jammed and over the course of a week, wrote and recorded Ceremony to the Sunset instead. Not to say the narrative lacks plausibility (Arce himself recounts it in the liner notes), but if that?s how it went down, the chemistry between Arce and Sons of Alpha Centauri members Nick Hannon (bass), Marlon King (guitar), Stevie B. (drums) and Blake (textures) must have been immediate. Otherwise the project would?ve fallen flat entirely — or, more likely, it wouldn?t have happened in the first place — and the intricate melodies that permeate ?Tomahawk Watercress? and closer ?Japanese Garden? would have nowhere near as much power as they do. Ceremony to the Sunset is a patient album, but it feels fast, spontaneous and exciting, striking a rare balance.

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