If Meth Teeth sound like a Northeast Portland house show-weaned
noise punk band that listened to a lot of those Mississippi Records
cassette compilations of American folk music arcane, it’s because they
are and they did.
Originally a rebound solo project for guitarist and vocalist Mattey
Hunter to explore his earthy side following the breakup of a few
neo-no-wave bands he was playing in, Meth Teeth soon grew to include
wunderkind drummer, designer, and audio engineer Kyle Raquipiso. At the
time, Raquipiso had just moved to Portland from Kennewick, Washington,
in order to pursue a degree at Pacific Northwest College of Art, aided
by the funds he’d been awarded as the winner of the Sub Pop Loser
Scholarship for culturally precocious Northwest teens.
The band, currently a trio with second guitarist Aaron Levy, has
suffered enough setbacks in personnel changes and equipment failures
that they dubbed their debut LP of signal-saturated,
Pixies-by-way-of-Pussy-Galore, art-scuzz folk Everything Went
Wrong. But enough went right that the album was released this month
on Brooklyn buzz label Woodsist, home to Meth Teeth kinfolk Kurt Vile
and Ganglians.
MERCURY: The Meth Teeth origin myth has it that you
started writing these songs as solo acoustic numbers, and were only
subsequently convinced to make them band pieces. Do you think of
your music as coming from a folk tradition or does the electric trio
setup ground it more in rock?
MATTEY HUNTER: I think it’s very much folk based, in the sense that
I was just writing what came to me with no thought of trying to make it
sound like anything else, especially. The electric-trio part is an
afterthought. Plus, us all coming from punk backgrounds it’s really the
only way we know how to present these ideas. At a punk show for a crowd
of people who would normally never give a folk record the time of day,
it’s a strange band. Bummed-out folk songs presented for a
sometimes-reluctant punk/garage crowd. But that’s just how it came
out.
One of the signatures of your sound is the conspicuous
tambourine. What about that instrument made you all want to
feature it more prominently than as just a percussive flourish?
We have a really thrashed drum set. It was stolen when I bought it.
It has obviously been thrown off stages. The snare drum sounds like a
trashcan, it doesn’t even cut through the mix. But if you bang a
tambourine on it, it becomes audible.
Now that your album is out, what’s next on the Meth Teeth docket?
Developing trench mouth or lockjaw or anything?
Tour in spring or summer for the Woodsist LP for sure. Kyle is
playing a bunch with Meercaz these days. It would be cool to do a new
record next year if the songs come. I really love this band but I don’t
want to put out a second record that sounds like a boring version of
the first one so we might do things a little differently for the next
one. Our two ideas thus far: more instruments and members, or just
saying fuck it and totally go acoustic. We’ll see. I think and hope
ultimately that we can become more fluid and more of a band when we
play rather than a recording project first and a live show second.
We’ve been jamming a lot lately at practice and have even started to
include Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” from Piper at the
Gates of Dawn in the set just to try to loosen it up a bit.
Meth Teeth plays the Doug Fir on Sunday, November 22.