Matmos
The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast
- Record Label
- Matador
About this item
The new record by San Francisco duo Matmos. It is a series of 'sound portraits' of a pantheon of people that they admire; a musical attempt at biography. "The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast" is loose in some places and very literal in others; taken as a suite of stylistically disparate songs, you get a kind of fractured family album, a historical pageant. It is at once Matmos' most melodic and most conceptual record. Matmos read the biographies and re-enacted events from their subjects' lives, making songs out of the sounds of the re-enactments. They gathered objects that were important to these people, made noises with them, and built melodies out of the noises, sometimes with just a tight focus on one detail and sometimes they revisit one event from their life. Sometimes they depict their subject abstractly. French horns, tuba, strings, harp, darbuka, voice, guitar, drums and synths are chopped into tricky rhythmic patterns and melodic motifs. It's a funkier, funnier affair than their last album, "The Civil War", but also a darker one.