Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out
The Antlers
“Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out,” the Antlers. There are few tropes more common to dreaming than having one’s teeth fall out, and no shortage of explanations as to what their loss might symbolize. Much of the speculation centers around feelings of impotence, though, and that may be the issue for the Antlers’ Peter Silberman here. The chronicle of a bad night out at a bar, Silberman worries that “two bad decisions don’t divide to cancel out,” and gets so drunk he must “try to gain control of the floor.”
On his last album, Hospice, there was no room for arty dream logic like the kind proposed by his song’s title — Silberman was stuck in a real cancer ward, and the tales he brought back from it were nearly too bleak to listen to. But on the great new Burst Apart, Silberman has at last gotten some distance from the emergency room. The result is a record that feels surprisingly loose; “Teeth” settles into something like an actual groove. The frontman’s fellow Antlers sound stronger here than they ever have; Silberman is supported by chiming mandolins, cacophonous guitars, and as the song crescendoes, a discordant wall of noise. Meanwhile, there’s something sexy about the way Silberman repeatedly sings “Try, try, try,” throughout the song, tagging the beats precisely, as if coaxing a reluctant lover into bed. He passes out before he succeeds, though, and the dreams are upon him again.
(track via curatedby)
