The Snake The Cross The Crown "Cotton Teeth" (Equal Vision)
By Jared Brownell
Friday. Apr 06, 11:57 AM
A surprisingly complementing style of folk and Brit rock.

All too often, you hear bands and critics touting interesting fusions of different styles on an album, when in reality it’s just formulas that have been repeated ad infinitum. Cotton Teeth by The Snake The Cross The Crown is quite the exception. It’s not ground breaking by any means, but it’s refreshingly good.

Cotton Teeth starts with the unassuming "Cakewalk," a gentle guitar plucking and a soft pleading voice slowly drifting along repeating the line: "I wanna live on stage / I wanna play the guitar / and I wanna get paid / but no responsibilities please / I wanna do what I want / and I wanna get paid!" It sounds like something you'd hear from a starving musician on the street corner or on the subway. If Dire Straits’ "Money For Nothing" was the song by loaded rock stars for the common man, "Cakewalk" is the song by the common man aspiring to be the loaded rock star. The true purpose "Cakewalk" serves is soon revealed, as this gateway song takes you by the hand and leads you into an album stocked full of wanderlust verses and tight, catchy choruses. The style of The Snake The Cross The Crown is hard to pin down: it inhabits some strange region between some of the darker Brit rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd), ‘60s folk (Dylan), and rootsy Southern music.

On "Hey Jim," the vocal melody roams up and down with contrasting and sporadic backup from the rest of the instruments, not at all unlike Janis Joplin or something off Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. It's playful, laid-back, and catchy as hell with its incoherent structure. This is contrasted with a moment of clarity when all the instrumentation solidifies to a coherent climax instead of playfully working against one another.

Not one to keep you listening to the same vocalist the whole album, The Snake The Cross The Crown change it up for "Electric Dream Plant," which is as close as one can get to a psychedelic ballet/anthem. Just when you think the band couldn't reference any more musicians, they make their nod of sorts to "Hey Jude” with their "nah, na na na, nah"s at the end. Oh yeah, and they're the first band in ages to successfully pull off the fade out. Usually, the fade out seems to be used as a half assed ending when a band has no clue how to wrap the song up cleanly. Here, it happens very slowly by removing the low end till it sounds like the band are performing in a tin can and then dropping the audio from there. The Snake The Cross The Crown make the fade out work.

Cotton Teeth is a great mix of complex melodies and catchy verses. The surprisingly complementing style of folk and Brit rock, along with multiple vocalists, is an aural treat and keeps the album feeling fresh listen after listen. Not to mention it may be the first time ever where you'll hear a keyboardist slowly and successfully twist a "Southern Baptist" organ into a synthesizer that sounds like it came off the soundtrack of Blade Runner.
www.snakecrosscrown.com
www.equalvision.com

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Jared Brownell

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