Baby Teeth's third album, Hustle Beachcame about as a result of a songwriting blog maintained by bandleader Abraham Levitan. The blog featured a new song each week for the course of year for all to see and critique. The songs that Levitan posted eventually wound up making up the bulk of material on Hustle Beach. While that's a most unusual way to go about preparing for an album, it actually kind of works as a great way to test out material without every having to leave home. Unfortunately, they may have wanted to try these songs out live before they ever recorded them.
While Baby Teeth may have been innovative in the testing out department, their songs aren't any where near as innovative. Instead, Hustle Beachis a very middle of the road record that sounds like a cross between a jam band and a subpar Bruce Springsteen tribute group. It's so plain that this is a record that plods it's way through it's eleven songs with barely any excitement at all. It's as if Hustle Beachwas just there and that's all that the band really cared about. This is a safe, unadventurous record that loses itself in a quagmire of boringness in about the first five or six minutes and never finds its way out. "Big Schools," for example, sounds so safe and mainstream that it's the sort of thing even fans of Dave Matthews Band would find unexciting.
Having sat through this several times I can honestly say I don't like it. Perhaps once Baby Teeth finish cutting their teeth sometime around the fifth album this band will turn into something far more exciting. Until then...there are far more fish in the sea that offer excitement and danger and isn't that's what rock and roll is about?
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