A review of Team Tomb's Team Tomb by me's me

Welcome back to Kittens in Ties, loyal reader. For this brief instant, we (meaning I) have slipped into the guise of music reviewer. If you like Pitchfork reviews, pretend I gave the album a 8.125 and a BNM tag or whatever it is they are doing over there nowadays. And listen to it here, and make up your own mind, knowing, however, that if your opinion isn't mine it is wrong.

In a review of the new Foals record, David Goldstein wrote, “What’s a telltale sign that a young British band thinks they’re hot shit? When they open their album with an instrumental,” and while I don’t know if Team Tomb thinks they are “hot shit,” I can say they sound pretty damn sure of themselves. After about thirty seconds of rhythm-less guitar noodling, the hi-hat comes in and clicks the intro track into a somber groove, the kind of groove the comprises the majority of the album. It’s something of a statement, though not made with any words. By the time the falsetto vocals slip into the mix you are already well aware of what kind of band you’re listening to.

For the most part, Team Tomb rides a mellow intensity throughout the album. The guitar licks, performed by Caleb Ian Campbell (formerly of the Polycorns), are graceful, sometimes biting, but never reaching beyond the slinky pop rhythms the band has carved out for itself. In that same vein, the drums drive and propel the tunes with a sort of rhythmic certainty but never really crescendo. Behind it all, simple keyboard lines complete the aesthetic.

To Fish

sean enfield is an asshole

who has taught three people

how to fish. one of them died

two years ago of starvation

while the other two live

impoverished in the slums

of houston waiting for fish

to hook themselves on the end

of one of their lines so that they

Teddy Hudson's Grandpa is Dead

I will always find amusement in the sight of my breath, in the pale smokey quality it exudes as I maneuver my lips into an oval and blow into the cold still breeze that defines the morning. As a child, I would try to pull the breath back into my chest, breathing inwards, watching it drift away from me and into the atmosphere and up through the clouds where it will forever drift, for once it escapes my lungs, there is no returning. All the while, she holds my hand, sending warmth through me and I through her. We both want to laugh and we both want to cry—not certain which emotion will triumph and fully aware which is most appropriate. Across from me, Teddy Hudson stands with hollow eyes like egg shells drained of their yolk. He wears a stern face, not quite a mask, and bears no tears. I don't expect him to cry. Others might, but I don't. He spent the whole week crying, locked in his room as Robert Smith sang on full bast—though not louder than the sounds of sobbing, yet even Mary, as agreeable as we tend to be, still expects him to cry.

          “He seems so—”

          He seems so angry, but that's not what she is going to say. She is going to say “empty” or “dejected” if she feels poetic enough.

           “—dejected,”she whispers.

A Rough Sketch of a Man Lost in Thought

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  The question, regrettably, conjured thoughts of the women currently locked in his basement without food or water to nourish her. It had been the first time he had considered her existence in the past few days, and what a place to do it—empty coffee shop, nothing but a day old croissant in his stomach that would not have been sold had he not been drunk enough to purchase it, seated across from a man whose name he could not remember and whose face seemed evil enough to be suspect. He first wondered if she were hungry, for he was hungry, only capable of thinking of others as they related to him. How much time had passed since he had last been home? The days had begun to blur into a singular haze; his last meal, that he could recall, came by way of a trash can and a diminished sense of self-regulation. He could still taste the dirt on the french fries, the mold on the half eaten roll, the piece of cardboard he had mistaken for chicken skin because it was that greasy and he was that inebriated. By now, her last meal might have been her own arm, though he figured her jaw had likely weakened, making it difficult to chew through the muscle—and she had some muscle through which she would need to chew—in order to make the task worthwhile. He almost felt cruel when he imagined it, but he could no longer remember the circumstances that had led to her detainment. Admittedly, he had a history of making irrational decisions in the wake of minor discrepancies: the most recent of which was choosing to get drunk at nine in the morning because he could not find his car keys. Of course, forced detainment of a woman he once claimed to love had to have now topped the list of poor and irrational decisions he had made. Still, shame crept into his emotions when he pictured her—not as she was in his basement but as she had been when he called her “honey” and “cutie pie” and “kitten dumpling”—when she would jokingly refer to him as an alcoholic, playful punch his shoulder and skip off into the distance, instigating a chase, and he would take off after her, wanting to wrap her in his arms and squeeze her until her heart popped onto his plain, black sweatshirt, kissing her neck all the while.