Baby Teeth tread the thin line between homage and pastiche. Every facet of Hustle Beach, the Chicago-area three-piece’s third full-length, glimmers with their love of all things 70s: R&B slow-jams, syncopated disco melodies, and enough cowbell to satiate Christopher Walken’s Bruce Dickenson. Unfortunately, they lose their footing a little too often for comfort. There are simply too many tracks that don’t amount to anything greater than the sum of the band’s influences.
The album starts off promisingly enough with “Big Schools.” It’s a page right out of Bruce Springsteen’s playbook: a shout-along anthem wrapped in nostalgia but tinged with a bittersweet sense of entrapment. Lyrically, the song is front man Abraham Levitan’s masterpiece. It begins as a sentimental reverie about how the speaker met the love of his life outside of a frat party he couldn’t get into. It’s a whirlwind romance powered by the sheer force of the protagonist’s optimism. The second verse, however, turns the whole narrative on its head:
Now we got three kids of our own/ And, man, do they ever resent us/ We gave them everything we never had/ They just roll their eyes and call us big spenders/ They take the lead from the books that they read/ When they never even seen it firsthand/ They think there’s shame in winning the game/ I just smile and say/ ‘How could they understand? We went to big schools.’
You can’t help but sympathize with the father’s confusion -- he chased down his dreams, conquered his corner of the world, only to end up estranged and alienated from his own children. Levitan accomplishes a rare feat: satirizing his subjects without distorting them or reducing them to straw men. With such an impressive opening volley, one couldn't help but believe Hustle Beach was going to play out like a white-collar Nebraska, an emotionally penetrating exploration of the suburban bourgeoisie.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album falls far short of that early high-water mark. The subsequent tracks quickly get bogged down by the sheer ubiquity of their backward nods. “The Part You Play” unfolds like a Squeeze parody; the title track is just a sleazier take on The Bee Gees; and “I Hope She Won’t Let Me” sounds like a white-boy’s impersonation of Al Green or Marvin Gaye. The slower numbers have a soulful edge that calls to mind Detroit’s similarly R&B-influenced Freer, but they lack the rawness that gives the latter band such immediacy. It doesn’t so much feel like Baby Teeth is interpreting 70s popular music so much as reproducing it for an indie rock crowd. In fact, in the context of the rest of the album, even the outstanding “Big Schools” feels not like an artistic achievement, but like just another trope for the band to test drive.
Hustle Beach is competently executed, but it lacks a creative vision of its own to animate it. It’s suitable music for a barroom or a background party mix, but offers little to ponder in the silence of your bedroom. Perhaps if Baby Teeth could rein in their sources of inspiration, they could become a formidable pop songwriting force. But with three records under their belt already, I’m not holding my breath.
1. Big Schools
2. The Part You Play
3. Hustle Beach
4. I Hope She Won’t Let Me
5. Shrine
6. Snake Eyes
7. The Rules
8. Let It Roll
9. The Swede
10. I Tried to Figure You Out
11. Hard to Find a Friend
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