Tooth, one of the capital’s most exciting new bands, add further fuel to the hype train with a track that displays a growing maturity and a deftness of touch.
Fresh from releasing one of the year’s most critically acclaimed EP’s with this summer’s ‘Restless In Bloom’, you’d forgive the London quartet for taking a moment to enjoy a well-earned pat on the noggin. Instead, ‘Take Me As I Am’ builds on the excitement of their debut whilst offering a glimpse of just how much more this band has to offer.
The youthful exuberance remains in the form of a restless rhythm, but is now accompanied by mournful guitars bursting with the weight of their own emotions. The long beloved ‘emo-bend’ accents a lead guitar line that constantly feels like it’s demanding to be played, the glacier cherry sat atop an anthemic urgency that has always characterised the very best of what the genre has to offer. ‘Take Me As I Am’ has that enviable quality of feeling like it is barely being contained by its own seams, fuelled by an inherent frustration at its heart that powers through into your own memories and experiences.
There is an earnest desperation in singer Tom Pollock’s proclamations, whose lyrics have matured towards grappling the uncertainty of coming of age. Characterised in his own words by an “ebbing and flowing between both a desperation to be accepted, and a resentment toward expectations of what or who I should be”, his delivery and sincerity gives the track the grounding needed to tie everything together. It’s the quintessential confusion and doubt that hits every young twenty-something looking out at the road of the rest of their life, carried by an earnest energy that helps the group escape cliche and instead capture the essence of an existential dread we all know so well.
‘Take Me As I Am’ is made for the moments when life gets that little bit too much and something just has to give. An exercise in pure frustration, a desperate howl into the ether that turns into catharsis once the waters have calmed. It’s thrilling to see a band grow and mature at rapid pace in real time, and each step Tooth takes serves to stoke the excitement and point towards a future that seems increasingly limitless.
Photo by Jude Harrison
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