The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast

"These digital-age surrealists have birthed a musical hybrid all their own.”
- Alternative Press

'The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast' is the brand new album in 2006 from hyper-innovative San Francisco duo Matmos and is best described as a series of "sound portraits” of a pantheon of people they admire, with one common thread.

A musical attempt at a biography, it's loose in some places and very literal in others; taken as a suite of stylistically disparate songs, you get a kind of fractured family album, a historical pageant. It's at once Matmos' most melodic and conceptual album.

With 10 tracks covering 10 people, Matmos approached the project by re-enacting events from these people's lives, making songs out of them. They gathered objects that were important to these people, made noises with them and built melodies out of the noises. This is Matmos at their surreal, inventive, outrageous best, and it's a challenging work of musical art!

The album features Matmos' most extremist and gutsy sound design - the sound of semen, burning flesh and the embalmed reproductive tract of a cow are all featured - but rubbed up against the most lyrical, heart-on-sleeve music they've ever written.

Aiding this is appearances from the likes of Antony […& The Johnsons], Kronos Quartet, Bjork, Maja Ratjke and more.

French horns, tuba, strings, harp, voice, guitar, drums and synths are chopped into tricky rhythmic patterns and melodic motifs. It's a funkier, funnier affair than their last record 'The Civil War', but also a much darker one.

'The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast' is accompanied by ten specially commissioned works of portraiture by such visual artists as Dan Clowes, Jason Mecier and Michael Bernard Loggins, that depict the subjects of each song.