Teeth Like God's Shoeshine

The record opens with this track and wastes no time establishing its terms: loud, fast, satirically savage, and completely committed to its own careening momentum. The guitars are distorted to the point of almost-chaos, rhythm section locked into a galloping tempo that pushes everything forward like a shopping cart with a broken wheel on a steep decline. Brock's voice is at its most theatrically unhinged here, pitching and sliding through syllables with the exaggerated mania of someone performing a sermon they don't entirely believe while being unable to stop delivering it. The song skewers the transactional nature of American aspiration — the hollow performance of success, the way people reduce themselves to their marketability and call it identity — but it does so with such ferocious energy that the critique becomes inseparable from the rush. This is the sound of The Lonesome Crowded West, an album that treats suburban sprawl and consumer culture as both subject and symptom, and this opener announces that aesthetic with maximum force. It belongs to the late-nineties moment when indie rock still felt like it was in genuine opposition to something, when volume and speed could function as argument. You put this on when you need to feel the specific electricity of barely contained contempt, when you want music that matches the grinding noise of a city that asks too much and offers too little in return.