Poet's Tooth

Album review

Tele Novella's third album, Poet's Tooth, picks up where their Kill Rock Stars debut, Merlynn Belle, left off, with the duo of Natalie Ribbons and Jason Chronis fashioning dusty, serenely haunted country-psych tunes with help from producer/instrumentalist Danny Reisch. Its cinematic nature is established early on, with the howling wind and patiently oscillating nylon-string guitar arpeggios of its opening seconds. An old-world ballad, "Young & Free" is soon fleshed out with other instruments, although they fall under the umbrella of the timeless and mystical sounds -- instruments like autoharp, vintage organ, and 12-string guitar as well as various keyboards, samples, and field recordings grace the album. Tele Novella turn up the volume and engage Reisch on drums and Chronis on echoing electric guitar and a prancing bass by the second track, the bluesier "Hard-Hearted Way." While the whole album falls into the broad category of psychedelic indie pop, they lean into classic country tropes, as on tracks with titles like "Rodeo Clown," a brokenhearted ballad with eventual harpsichord timbres, and "Vampire Cowgirl," a song that features clip-clopping percussion, slide guitar, and Ribbons' yodel-type inflections alongside scratchy needle-on-vinyl effects. Elsewhere, the lusher title track, a poetic character study, accompanies a recitation-like delivery with field recordings of crowd noise, orchestra chimes, atmospheric faux flutes, and other celestial keyboard tones in addition to an insistent overdriven bassline. Philosophical, whimsical, and occasionally twisted throughout, the album closes with "Funeral," which bemoans, "Shot in the dark/Missed it by a mile/Still left a mark/Couldn't blame us for trying." Hardcore aficionados of the broader style may like to know about the cover of "The Unicorn" (1974) by Peter Grudzien that appears seamlessly around the midpoint of the fanciful track list.

© Marcy Donelson /TiVo