Baring Teeth – Ghost Chorus Among Old Ruins

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Amazing what a difference three years can make. When Baring Teeth released Atrophy in 2011 they were positioned to be the face of a new cutting edge of harsh and frighteningly technical death metal. At the time, their combination of brainy rhythms, free-wheeling dissonance and liberal use of extended guitar techniques made the Texas trio feel like the vindication of ground broken by Gorguts’ landmark release Obscura. But by failing to strike while the iron was hot with a timely follow up Baring Teeth are now having to play catch up. Their former contemporaries Ulcerate have gone on to be an established name in the extreme end of death metal, while their forbearers Gorguts made a triumphant return. The qualities that made Baring Teeth stick out like a broken thumb in 2011 have almost been normalized into the genre’s conventions by 2014.

Even so, Baring Teeth execute their ambition at a high level of songcraft. Any death metal musician worth their salt can string together a few odd time signatures or dash in the occasional minor ninth into a riff, but it takes a whole other caliber of artist to build compelling and genuinely shocking songs out of those ingredients. What Ghost Chorus Among Old Ruins proves is that even if Baring Teeth have remained out of the spotlight for the last few years, they haven’t stopped working on their craft in the interim. At a taught 37 minutes, the record showcases how the band has learned to jettison any excess fat from their already efficient process.

The leanness on Ghost Chorus Among Old Ruins comes from a mix of two things. First, the slower, more atmospheric sections on Atrophy are far less common here, mostly regulated to short transitions and only dominating the run time on “Terra Nullius” and “The Unwilling.” While Baring Teeth’s slower side was never a weakness, this slight shift gives the material here a brisker pace, which helps their long numbers like “The Great Unwashed” breeze by.

The second reason is a matter of arrangement and awareness of sonic space. Despite doubling down on their commitment to stretching their listener’s harmonic comfort zone to its absolute limits, Baring Teeth are considerate to not overload any one angle. Drummer Jason Roe can blast with the best of them, but gets more mileage out of tricky math rock rhythms and elastic midtempo playing. Similarly, guitarist Andrew Harkins is content to leave the low end to bassist Scott Addison and explore the textural possibilities of the upper register. This makes the few times when the band locks into the traditional death metal mode of “low tunings + wall-to-wall blast beats” even more shocking by power of contrast.

The production on Ghost Chorus Among Old Ruins gives each instrument spacious separation and a roomy ambience that humanizes the alien contents of the songs themselves. You could say that it’s a “warts and all” affair, but this would be wrong in two ways. First, Baring Teeth are such impeccable musicians that any flubs or flaws are utterly imperceptible to anyone but themselves. Second, ugliness is central to the appeal of their music. All there is are warts! And it’s through that hideousness that Baring Teeth have proved that three years in the grand scheme of things is no time at all, and that even if the iron has cooled off, a strong enough strike will still make its mark.

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