Young Circles: "Sharp Teeth"


By Alan Baban | 15 November 2010

“Sharp Teeth” is shatterproof. Like the rest of the Young Circles awesome Bones EP, the sound is free-speaking, uncontained, unbuttoned, and at ease. This is garage rock that’s into UK garage; heady space-rock that’s just into space, period; this is the psychotic sound of a lounge singer violently overcome by ropey spumes of noise. Obviously, you gotta love exactly all of it. “Sharp Teeth” starts with a fog of go-nowhere percussive elements and hazy sound effects, eerie plinks and plops that soon get re-integrated into a squelchy distorto-pop monster. The chorus, a big arena-ready Hamilton Leithauser thing, goes: “Knock me off my tower / Sweetness tastes so sour / I stay underneath / Sharpened teeth.”

The hooks here get cut out of semi-liquidity. What begins as stream-of-conscious scatting evolves into a drawn-out earworm of a melody. And all the while, these guys’ percussion sounds like some wild subastral froth—bending over backwards, performing backflips, throwing knives in the direction of the beat in a way that elementally kills it. The most charming bit, though? None of it sounds concrete. Young Circles is definitely a band to watch.