The name of duo Jussi Brightmore and Tom Fug’s band already evokes the eviscerating horror of everyday human existence. Gum Takes Tooth have spent a decade chiselling noise that folds and crashes in on itself, a hot wire to the blood. They have effected a move away from the kinetic freneticism of live thrashing-and-bashing into a more synthetic version of their unhuman reality. But Arrow also has a sharpened focus: a coruscating chimera prowling the brutalities of London, shouting into the void.
This isn’t an easy listen, or at times even an enjoyable one – Arrow grabs you by the back of the neck and proceeds to electrocute you from inside out, hissing “do you see?” in your ear every 30 seconds. From the artificial heartbeat and shattered, sinuous vocals of opener ‘Chrome Cold Hearts’ to the outer-space metallic maelstrom of ‘House Built On Fire’, Gum Takes Tooth make sure that this is not escapism, but a shackling to the Hellmouth that we have all helped to create.
Back to that intro – ‘Cold Chrome Hearts’ is a more ambient approach, a sprawling psych deconstruction so cavernous in its echoes and spaces that each drum beat and cymbal shimmer seems to stretch into oblivion. It’s a narcoleptic entry-point, but also a perceptive subversion of what is to come, mirroring the global upheaval the duo attempt to emulate. The pseudo-title track ‘The Arrow’ is the clearest indication of what GTT has done before – a seven-minute metallic whoosh of groove-laden menace seamlessly weaving electronic blasts with organic bluster.
Here’s the kicker that underpins most of these tracks: there is a warmth beneath the pitch-black surface, a heat and (dare I say it?) heart that imbues everything, even the bleakness, with a hope for the future.
It does take some finding at times, though. ‘No Walls, No Air’ takes a Girls Against Boys vocal breathlessness and skittish electronic taps and hisses in a downward spiral of contempt for the world that continues to bloom around them; it wipes the slate clean of the past and creates an unobtainable, bland, acrid future with a clear use-by date. ‘Borrowed Lies’ takes this idea and spikes it into the earth – it’s an angrier screed where frenetic drums provide the relief from the onslaught. ‘A Still Earth’ dives even further into the depths, a doom track that doubles as the clarion call by the pallbearers of our future.
There are moments of relief, if you can call it that. ‘Fights Physiology’ plays like cassette-warped 80s acid house, causing bodily twitches and exertions without ever letting a natural flow to develop. And yet is inimitably enjoyable. Closer ‘House Built On Fire’ is an attention-deficit blast, Dan Deacon bursts of bubblegum dance circles are pierced by shards of euphoric noise, in a cathartic bitter pill that we are happy to swallow – and there is that hope that has been hinted at before. Even in the depths of despair, there must be space to shirk the shackles and rejoice in being alive, however briefly.
