Smiling With No Teeth

Not 20 seconds into Smiling with No Teeth, the debut album from Canberra, Australia-based musician Genesis Owusu, we get our first taste of pain: Feel the fur on the bruise, the vocalist barks from a sea of glitching electronica, giving his black dog its first wound. A motif of multiplicity, the creature that proves that namesake for three of the records tracks holds storied significance -- a poetic reference to depression, a folkloric omen of death -- yet wherever it manifests comes suffering. Owusu knows what it means to be dancing with scars, to be othered, to be defined against a wall of archetypes. Often, there are no pretenses made: This is true: I dont like you, I dont like you runs the chorus of Dont Need You, while Whip Cracker hits an electric note with its statements of defiance. Yet deep-rooted feelings drip into even the smoothest cuts on the album, lining the swoon-ready Waiting for You with anxious dwellings and ensuring that Easy feels anything but. Theres a sense of anxiety, of darkness, that permeates through even the most saccharine of synth lines. Stylistically, Owusu traces dimensions of hip-hop, synth pop, funk, and more, never quite settling for long enough to band Smiling with No Teeth under any single banner. The style/substance balance is a difficult one to negotiate -- Whip Cracker transitions from upstart energy to Daft Punk-ery with minimal grace, while flecks of futuristic dance dont quite land on I Dont See Colour -- but for the large part, Owusu is a blessing to his genres, gifting them with his vivid personality and potent narrative threads. Questions of cohesion are entirely misplaced. The riverside piano of A Song About Fishing lands neatly among the ephemeral dance of Easy and the lone-road jazz of No Looking Back, bound to one another by their creators singular presence. Owusus black dog is one charged with misery, prejudice, and anxiety, a stray figure clouded by personal struggles and vast, smothering questions -- and on Smiling with No Teeth, the Canberra vocalist manifests this figure in all its bittersweet forms. ~ David Crone