‘Octavian Eclipse’ single out now, from the album ‘Recovery Position’ out 14 April.
As Gum Takes Tooth the duo of Thomas Fuglesang and Jussi Brightmore plot an adventurous, idiosyncratic and willfully unpredictable trajectory. Formed in East London in 2008, early material coalesced primitive Silver Apples electronics, blast beat mayhem, and experimental noise from the raw energy of their gigs across the East London underground music and art scene. From these beginnings the outfit has continued to explore and mutate with an ever more nuanced approach while maintaining a staunch commitment to non-conformity.
Marrying an unflinching beat-driven assault to a questing and transformative vision, their fourth album Recovery Position may represent a clean slate for Gum Takes Tooth at a time when this ever shifting and morphing entity sheds its skin once again, revealing a formidable new form. While transmogrified, the entity remains driven by the same interpersonal and musical chemistry of its creators. Recalibrating their signature enmeshing of drums and electronics they’ve landed on a propulsive binary-driven delivery that stubbornly eschews genre constraints and modes of comparison.
The fresh approach began when the band began experimenting live, channelling the sparks from jam-driven spontaneity whilst also moving away from rock dynamics in favour of a more kaleidoscopic meld of ideas. Nonetheless, Recovery Position maintains a clear affinity for the pulse-raising effect of the red dB meter or the rattle and rumble of a bass bin under duress.Thus was birthed the mutant 808 protest music of opener Armistice, the industrial grime aerobics of Small Arms and the sci-fi hands-in-the-air rave banger Octavian Eclipse alike.
In the throes of potential catastrophe, the challenge remains to navigate back from the brink. The method of reinventing oneself anew in the face of adversity. The material presented within Recovery Position marks this process for Gum Takes Tooth. The album was not without its travails in the making, given the band’s personal challenges and reinventions - Jussi and Tom have traversed a full-scale emigration from the UK (in the case of Brightmore) along with battling serious illness, personal revelations and the attendant shockwaves and challenges of the Covid era. Yet with the assistance of Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse studios in London, the duo have alchemically transcended their circumstances, channelling the personal and political into salvation by way of frequency overload and raw catharsis, a reanimated howl of the human regaining control over the machine.
True to form for this always quixotic outfit, what’s emerged from the cocoon of the difficult last four years is their most singular and potent work to date - simultaneously their most pop-adjacent and their most extreme. A glorious collision of the idealism of rave adventures of yore and dreamlike visions of the future, Recovery Position is an audial landscape where psychic oppression is vanquished.
