Your Mercury

Teeth of the Sea are a pack of youngish Brits who clearly have a passion for ‘70s beard rock, but not the post-psych/early-prog flavors favored by peers like Wolf People; rather, the band’s interests run in the direction of krautrock and Hawkwind-indebted space-rock. On the mostly instrumental Your Mercury, Teeth of the Sea summons up enough cosmic synth sprinkles and fuzzy guitar coruscations to keep middle-aged, gray-bearded men with custom-ordered Gong and Amon Duul II t-shirts in an orgiastic state, but they also throw in enough modern sonic touchstones to appeal to anyone raised on post-rock or the more experimental end of the ambient/electronic musical spectrum. On an album that’s quite necessarily more about texture and atmosphere than composition, the band does a great job of alternating between the heavy and the heavenly; one moment the listener feels in danger of being crushed beneath the weight of mountainous guitar slabs, and the next there’s an ethereal layer of electronics promising a swift trip to the stars. And when Your Mercury introduces a more “serious” side with the Robert Ashley-esque spoken-word loops of “Red Soil” and the Jon Hassell-tinged brass impressionism of “Hovis Coil,” the plot thickens agreeably.