Raime – Tooth – CD

Raime’s second album, “Tooth”, arrived June 10, 2016 on 2xLP, CD and digital formats. The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, “Quarter Turns Over A Living Line”, gives way to an urgent and focussed futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely uptempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms.

No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding synths and lethal sub-bass drive the engine. The production is immaculate, high definition. No hiss, no obscuring drones or extraneous noise: the music of “Tooth” is wide-open and exposed. The seeds of its supple dancehall biomechanics can be found in the self-titled 2013 EP by Raime side-project Moin, an ahead-of-its-time synthesis of art-rock and soundsystem sensibilities, but “Tooth” pushes the template further, binding the disparate elements together so tightly that they become indistinguishable from one another.

If “Quarter Turns” was an album that confronted total loss and self-destruction, even longed for it, then “Tooth” is the sound of resistance and counter-attack: cunning, quick, resolute; calling upon stealth as much as brute-force. At a time when so many pay lip service to experimentation without ever fully committing themselves or their work to it, Raime return from three years of deep, dedicated studio research with a bold and original new music: staunch, rude, and way out in front.