by Leah B. Levinson (@littlest_b_)
I caught a Teton set last year while the band was on tour. It was an exhaustive excursion, impeccably orchestrated, exploring a dense sound world rife with information and color, so packed that it reached a degree of monotony, grayness. Rhythmic and melodic forms repeated in unlikely ways or otherwise hardly repeated at all. Harmonies moved not in the more traditional narrative structure that Western harmony lends itself to, nor with the suspended sense of harmonic tension and release that rock inherited from the blues, but, instead, as shifting tectonic plates: momentous motions amount to a constant present, always settling in. For about forty minutes that night, this land settled and resettled like so, slowly shifting.
Dump presents a very small sampling of the colossal outing I heard that night. It provides a small window looking out upon the vast and complex assemblage that is a garbage dump, a swamp, a universe. The four tracks here feel instantly intertwined with one another (as with the band’s 2016 debut, Candy Spelling) and fully realized enough that the expanse that lies beyond them is inevitable. In this way, Teton feels less like band-as-an-artistic-outlet than a mystical conduit through which some distant, almighty, hyper-capitalist, and apathetic energy expresses itself, a monolithic gray-brown mass that we cannot fathom completely, something like our carbon footprint or the plastic waste we toss off into the ocean for slow decay.
It’s a cold, gray challenge, the average of consumption taken in from afar, all our culture. The other side of which is trash, heaping and foul, variegated in texture, full. Teton takes the icy synthesizers and closed-throated vocals of 80s pop acts like Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, Duran Duran, and 10cc, and draws on them at their meeting point with the post-consumerist sensibilities of James Ferraro, Elysia Crampton, Jlin, and Holly Herndon. It’s the end point of the algorithm, shaping global taste en masse in an instantaneous feedback loop, making us more like ourselves, more consistent, more of less.
These arrangements—toxic mutations upon the rock band or prog-synth-pop act—present a sort of hydra with separate parts spawning out in different directions in a spectacular counterpoint. With even pacing, a generally unbroken pulse, and a steady dynamic (all of which seem to only be steadying as the band continues its production), Dump and its precedent both tower as an obelisk and perplex as a labyrinth. Not easy music and not so much there for you to have. More so just there, period, ambivalent.