With a name like All Teeth and Knuckles (or “ATAK” for short, per their suggestion), you’re going to expect anger; with a front man like Patric “Sick Face” Fallon, you’re going to get it. These San Francisco natives like to get drunk and belligerent and then write infectious, if rudimentary, songs about it. Club Hits to Hit the Clubs With wont be that classic album you’ll save for when your grandkids break out the wacky old “CD player” in hopes of discovering hot jams of the aughts, but it sure has its moments.
ATAK’s bio insists that the band defies genre and rails against the effectiveness of comparing them to other bands. The thing is, I couldn’t stop thinking about some glaring similarities with a couple of New York’s dance-driven finest; Fallon’s irreverent tone and the lazy energy of his voice, as if he were just chatting with you at a (very hip) party, suggest James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, while the sweaty, steadily danceable beat is so very !!!.
I struggled with whether or not I actually liked Fallon. The timid, loveable soul with a crush on Lovefoxxx on one of the album’s more enjoyable tracks, “Let’s Undress and Listen to CSS”, battled with the annoying braggadocio of “Manage It”, about a person so uber hip that he never has to pay for clothes or drinks. In “Fuck Your Jacket,” he manages to straddle the likeability line; who can’t empathize with his lament about leather jacket-clad “douchebags” intruding on his favorite nightspots? But, when he bemoans the crowd’s lack of blazers, seersuckers and Members-Only jackets, I must ask – do those jackets not also a douchebag make?
These ten tracks are short and sweet and they blend together so seamlessly that the album almost sounds like one long song, or at least a DJ mix. There isn’t much fluctuation on tempo, theme or intensity throughout. In “My 411 Track,” Fallon offers -“I don’t need a lyricist / I just write what I know / Tellin’ ya ’bout all the shit I see / And all the shitty places I go.” Empty? Trite? Maybe. But, catchy? Definitely.
