Enjoying Baby Teeth’s Hustle Beach, in three easy steps!

Baby Teeth – “Big Schools” (buy)

You procure (legally!) a copy of Hustle Beach, the new album from Chicago pop-rockers Baby Teeth. Congratulations! You’re ready for an American musical adventure of an exceptional caliber. We hope you’ve brought an enterprising can-do spirit and a positive attitude.

If you are familiar with the brash, bombastic, sometimes nonsensical, always endearing music of Abraham Levitan (nee Pearly Sweets) and company, perhaps having heard The Baby Teeth Album or 2007’s The Simp, these instructions are provided merely as guidelines for your aural enjoyment. If you’ve never heard these guys before, that’s okay! Sit back, relax, and let us take care of everything.

Step one: Pleasantries

Before you do anything crazy, it’s worth it to give this album a spin in the ol’ ceedee player (or a metaphorical spin in the ol’ digital mp3 device of your choosing), maybe while you’re sitting down and making coffee, or while you’re at work (work, work, work – don’t worry, you’ll get that reference once you listen to the album), or however you like to initially encounter good (or even – magnificent! Triumphant! Nonsensical, but endearing!) albums.

Hustle Beach represents a shift for Baby Teeth, one we will entertain to explain later on in the pamphlet (in Mr. Levitan’s own words, no less). Suffice to say that it’s almost like the band is going back in time, or at least trying on different period costumes. The Baby Teeth Album is an off-beat salute to coked-out celebrities, velvet sweet melons, big menacing trucks and other fever-dreamy things. (A long-favorite video from Baby Teeth Album-era Baby Teeth is this greasy tale of a stalker and his fantasy derby girl, with a prominent riff on Madonna’s “Borderline.”)

The Simp was a break-out work, a more sincere – but still ardently and irreverently theatrical – album, with cheeky disco dance-breaks, na-na-na sing-alongs, references to Russian art critics and some of my favorite ultimatums in pop music ever writ (“You’re either on the swim team or you’re not”). It was a showy, glossy, thoroughly modern album.

But Hustle Beach. Well.

The first track, “Big Schools” – that arena-ready, so-pantomime-able opening keyboard line – sounds, even before Abraham belts out the first portentous line of this college rock anthem (“Friday night/Frat house in sight,/A party that I couldn’t get into”), so essentially Springsteen that when Springsteen came up in conversation a few days after I heard this album for the first time, the first song that came to mind was “Big Schools.”

This album (some smarty-pants music critics might call it a “jukebox album”) does not hold its hand of influences too close to its chest. In fact it’s kind of like they don’t know shit about playing poker and they want you to help them figure out what to do, because they’re showing you everything right over their shoulder. I particularly like that about this album: depending on how you look at it, it’s like a Rorschach test (just like Barack Obama!) in which you can hear damn near anything you want, or a reflecting pool, in which you can hear shades of just about everything in the Great Pop Songbook of the late-20^th Century, from Queen to Cake to Billy Joel to Otis Redding to Prince to Cheap Trick to David Bowie to The Beatles to, in ample evidence, The Boss.

One of my favorite tracks on this album – in fact, I’ll go ahead and not mince words, it’s one of the best tracks on this album – is “I Hope She Won’t Let Me,” a Vox-drenched ballad in three-part harmony and six-eight time that is as old-school pool hall soul as “Let it Roll” (my other favorite, and the other best, song) is genuine-article slow-burn hair-band anthem – it’s a song I’ve called upon, in many dark and difficult hours, to bring me strength. I know that sounds crazy, but tell me honestly – you’ve felt the same way about “Don’t Stop Believin’,” haven’t you?

The more absurd touches that are Baby Teeth’s calling card are still here, like on “Snake Eyes,” a droning, off-key defense of some lady named – uh – Snake Eyes. (“If you’re thinkin’ you know about Snake Eyes/ … You’re right!” “If you’re thinkin’ you’re gonna touch Snake Eyes/ …. You’re wrong!”) It sounds ridiculous. It IS ridiculous. It is also a riot.

But in general, Baby Teeth is trying something that’s new for them, but pretty old-fashioned as the story of modern songwriting goes: telling the truth, and confronting those age-old issues – love, work, ageing, insecurity, uncertainty and defeat – head-on.

And I don’t just know this because I’m a music writer. I read about it! On a blog. Which brings us to step two.

Step 2: Scholarship

If you’ve listened to Hustle Beach a few times now (and regardless of how you feel about it, I bet you can at least concede that it’s damn catchy), and you’re struggling to suss it out, or would just like to learn more, hop on over to the 52 Teeth blog.

Hustle Beach, as it turns out, is the final product of a whole year’s worth of writing one new song every week. Come hail or high water, Abraham clunked out a shaky little demo, popped it on WordPress and – to the joy of archivists, historians, and scavenging music writers like me – wrote about its varied influences, ripped-off melodies, lyrical levels of meaning and whatever else struck his fancy.

Not all of the songs on Hustle Beach were on 52 Teeth first, and obviously, not every song on 52 Teeth made it onto the record. But a few are there, and reading the artist’s thoughts on them, after a few listens to the whole work of art, is mighty edifying.

I’ve learned, for instance, that the (genius) first line of “The Part You Play” (“You walked into the party/Like it was your yacht”) is actually a play on the first line of the Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain,” and that the title track “Hustle Beach” is an attempt to merge the influence of reggae, David Foster Wallace, neuroticism about work ethic, Andy Pratt, The Eagles, Allan Touissant and M.I.A. Fun! It’s also the source of, yes, my belief that the men of Baby Teeth are attempting to do something a little more direct in their songmanship. Again, from his entry on Hustle Beach, Abraham writes:

The lyrics represent my attempt to write more directly. Every line was scrutinized to make sure that I could understand what it was about. This is how I’d like to write from now on.

Abraham reads a lot (as you may have realized if you made the connection that “The Swede” is a reference to a Phillip Roth novel. I did not), and his writing is charming, so if you’re the scholarly, researchin’ type, you might find yourself, as I have, lost in the archives for an hour or so.

Step 3: Forgetting

When you’ve thought all there is to think about Hustle Beach – there’s a lot, although to be fair to this blog’s very indulgent editors, probably no more than there is to think about most other good albums – you should take a few deep breaths, cleanse your palette with some other album (maybe one that you know and love well, so you won’t get wrapped up), then pack up Hustle Beach and take it with you on a good old-fashioned American road trip (maybe to a beach).

I have always allowed myself to give in to Baby Teeth most wholly in the car, and in fact have both their first and second albums burned onto a single CD (which never, ever leaves my car). I turn up the volume, sometimes little by little as I become more and more enveloped in the bravado, showmanship and silly earnestness of the music. And then I drive a little faster.

Driving along to Baby Teeth allows me to forget all of the garbage that I sometimes feel obliged to project upon an album, to lose my critical mind, to strip away all of the influences, necessary comparisons and value judgments. With Baby Teeth, I usually remember, subsequently, that even their most derivative songs are derived from classic, timeless works. The smart, snappy, slightly irreverent, somewhat scholarly, sometimes nonsensical, always endearing way in which Hustle Beach folds all of those derivatives into itself makes it, I have to say, a classic, in its own right.