Hen's Teeth (LOSER Edition Vinyl)

In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly and inspired each other so much that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins: they share DNA and complement each other but have distinct identities and are defined as much by their differences as their similarities.

Light Verse (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humor, and nonsense. Its cover depicts figures in silhouette, floating or falling through a cyanotype sky. It’s a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. Many of the songs are named for ideas or feelings that gesture toward hope amidst uncertainty: “You Never Know,” “All in Good Time” (a gorgeous duet with Fiona Apple), “Cutting It Close,” “Taken by Surprise.”

The world of Hen’s Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like “Roses,” “Robin’s Egg,” “Dates and Dead People,” “Singing Saw.” “Run into the one you love forever / Laugh into each other’s empty mouth,” Beam sings on “Roses,” the album’s first track. It’s one of several songs in which lovers are depicted as so deeply entwined they physically merge. “Paper and Stone” recalls that “But for the time we fell in two / You’d be me and I’d be you / One crust of bread could fit in our mouths / You’d breathe in and I’d let it out.” And on “In Your Ocean,” we find Beam “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.”

The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life. He is wearing a pin-stripe jacket and holding a massive cluster of grapes, prodigious beard spilling down his chest. He could be a local harvest god or a gentleman outlaw holed up in a jungle cave. There are white feathers covering his eyes but these somehow do not suggest blindness. Rather they seem to literalize the poetic notion of an artist’s vision taking flight. The whole surreal scene is washed in humid, spooky red. It’s somewhere between Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and the contrast with the cool blue-white palette of Light Verse could not be starker.

“The experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to’s has been Van Morrisson’s Astral Weeks, that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in different ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing. ‘Singing Saw’ feels like a song that Doc Boggs and Simon & Garfunkel might have done together. ‘Roses’ and ‘In Your Ocean’ are straight forward folk rock, but they build to these apocalyptic endings. ‘Dates and Dead People’ and ‘Defiance, Ohio’ take a lot from Tropicalia, which is some of my favorite music too. I don’t see it as that much different from jazz. All these forms have been in rock music forever.” - Justin Taylor