The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast

More like a portable gallery installation than a mere album, Matmos' The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast is a collection of fascinating, fractured audio and visual portraits of ten prominent gay and lesbian figures, among them writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and musicians. The previous two Matmos albums kept the music closely tied to the concepts they explored, with surgical sounds making up A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure and The Civil War immersed in medieval music and American folk. The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, however, loosely holds together very different tracks that fuse art, history, and politics as they chop and manipulate sounds that include a cow's reproductive tract and styles of music ranging from surf to power electronics. Similarly, Matmos' approaches to their portraits span photograph-like detail and literalism to highly abstract smears and splashes of sound. "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" is more on the literal side: beginning with dried-roses-and-wisdom-teeth percussion, the track builds to include samples of beaver, shark and goat teeth, mooing cows, and honking geese as Laetitia Sonami, Bj?rk, and M.C. Schmidt's brother Werner recite a passage from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. At the other end of the spectrum is "Semen Song for James Bidgood," where Antony's vocals and Zeena Parkins' harp are looped and layered upon each other in an impressionistic, sensual homage to the director of Pink Narcissus. The album's accompanying visual artwork is just as wide-ranging, with Daniel Clowes turning in a creepy-comical caricature to go along with the porn-funk of "Public Sex for Boyd McDonald." Jason Mecier contributes a snail shell, cigarette butts, and twigs likeness of novelist Patricia Highsmith, whose tense, jazzy audio portrait deftly captures the danger and intrigue of stories like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley