Pandemic slowdown gives shape to Teeth Marks 

Early in the pandemic, there were fleeting moments when Joshua James thought music might be a thing of the past. 

“There were days I might have said that, if not out loud to myself,” the singer and songwriter said in early November. “I didn’t envision wanting to immediately get back into a band. I think like a lot of people during the pandemic, art just wasn’t coming to me.”

Prior to Covid, James fronted the Columbus indie-pop band Yellow Paper Planes (formerly Joshua P. James and the Paper Planes), which knocked around town for the better part of a decade before playing its last concert in the weeks before the March 2020 lockdown. For the next five or six months that followed, James said he didn’t play his guitar – a reality that would have previously been unthinkable to the musician. 

“I would pick it up and not care about it. … And there was a point it was like, oh, I don’t know if I have any songs to sing,” he said. “But once songs started to come, it was like, no, I do want to work on these. And I want them to be things I can play to something other than my bedroom walls.”

At the same time, James knew the songs that were beginning to surface occupied a different sonic space than the music he previously explored within Yellow Paper Planes, which the band members collectively decided had run its course. James credited this shift in musical direction to multiple factors, including a set of criteria he placed on himself early in the creative process, such as writing songs with but a single chord. The slowed down pace of pandemic life and the collective weight of this social and political era also combined to enact a toll, naturally pulling the songs in a slower, heavier direction.

“Whatever the reason, the songs that started coming out of me felt like they needed more space, and everybody quickly realized that and glommed onto it,” said James, who in the summer of 2022 reteamed with his former YPP bandmates in Teeth Marks, which will celebrate the release of its debut album, Raise/Wreck/Rebuild/Raze, in concert at Ace of Cups on Friday, Nov. 14, supported by Liteweight Champion and Siphoner. “And we’d have conversations, like, is it going to be pretty and slow? Is it going to be heavy and slow?”

Part of this process involved stripping things down to the sparsest possible presentation, with James recalling how the crew would prod lead guitarist Jeremy Ebert to dial back his playing. “Some of his early takes, he would do a lot of notes, and it would be like, ‘Okay, that was cool. Now can you do it in eight notes instead of 16?’ … And then that question inevitably became, ‘Can you do it in four instead of eight?’ said James, who similarly took a scalpel to his lyrics, editing things down in a way that made the tracks read as more impressionistic than anything he’d written in the past. “I know what I was writing about, but I think it’s maybe not as apparent in this set of songs because of that paring down of the verbiage.”

At times, James treads more explicitly political ground (“Tin Soldiers,” which alternates between moments of spectral beauty and grander, heavier guitar passages), while other songs are comparatively intimate and self-lacerating, shaped by the frontman’s efforts to balance family life and the extracurriculars that can sometimes go hand-in-hand with the pursuit of music. 

“When I reflect on the record, I can tell a lot of the things I continue to battle are in there, like being a husband and a father but then staying out until three in the morning to close the bar because I played a show there,” he said. “And sometimes it starts to feel like I’m getting a little too old for that kind of thing. … So, yeah, there are certainly lines on this record and even entire songs where I’d be open to the suggestion that they’re about me, or what I fear might be some of my failings.”

These ideas materialize most cleanly on “Full Weight,” a crushingly heavy, deeply melodic track on which the song’s narrator appears to wrestle with the guilt of past behaviors. “I’ve washed my hands over and over,” James sings. “But I can still smell the blood.”

Though rooted in weariness and unrest, the album ends on a more hopeful note with “Neon Blackness,” a slow burner on which James reckons with burnout and expresses a renewed desire to slow down and savor each moment as it comes.

“We were starting to get very ambitious toward the end of YPP, talking to labels about putting out the next record, making tour plans. … And I think ambitions can be a double-edged sword sometimes, and it’s easy to get caught up on the wrong side of it, where that pressure can make you and the people around you a little unhappy,” James said. “I’m hoping to have curbed that a little bit.”