Baby Teeth
Hustle Beach (Lujo Records)

Hustle Beach is the third album from Baby Teeth, Chicago's reigning champions of brainy pop. The album is the fruit of a songwriting blog, "52 Teeth," maintained by bandleader Abraham Levitan, on which he posted a new song each week for one year. Over the course of this project, inspired by Philip Roth's American Pastoral, he began writing about suburban dystopia, generating the lyrical heart of the album -- songs like "Big Schools," "The Swede," and "Hustle Beach."

The production, live and lean, captures the intensity of Baby Teeth's performances. Long celebrated for their chops, songwriting, and massively entertaining live shows, the band wanted to make this album on the quick, using as many live takes as possible. In the summer of 2008, they decamped to Key Club, the legendary live-in studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan, that birthed great records from the Fiery Furnaces, Franz Ferdinand, and the Kills. Leaving only to grab a daily plate of barbecue, Baby Teeth finished basic tracking in four days.

The album shows Abraham’s newfound commitment to lyrically direct songwriting. Emerging from the soaring melodrama of The Simp (2007), Hustle Beach is a gritty response for the recession era. It looks at life as it is – growing up, getting married, going on vacations, acquiring material possessions, losing material possessions, growing old – with humor and intelligence fully intact. It's also a terribly catchy record that makes you drive fast.

Real life: marriages, kids, walking outside in your robe to pick up the Sunday paper. Day jobs. Abraham, originally from Louisville, Kentucky, heads a piano teaching group and composed songs for a 2009 production of Jenny Schwartz’s absurdist verse play God’s Ear. Bassist Jim Cooper, a D.C. native, is a film composer and church orchestra director. Drummer Peter Andreadis, a product of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a mastering engineer. The three met in Chicago, where Peter mixed an album for Abraham’s previous band (the Platonics), and where Abraham and Jim started attending each other’s shows with regularity. (Jim was and is the frontman for Detholz!, and Jim and Abraham also did a stint together in Bobby Conn and the Glass Gypsies.)

From here on out, it's all direct reporting and great songwriting. Journalism from the domestic front lines. Recommended for fans of Spoon, the Hold Steady, Jonathan Franzen, Harry Nilsson, Saul Bellow, and E.L.O. Endorsed by David Berman, Bobby Conn, and Robert Pollard.

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