Peter and Aaron MoDavis, the fraternal twins who front Philadelphia indie-rock band the Teeth, weren't competing to pack as many musical ideas as they could into the songs on their tuneful new album
You're My Lover Now
.
It just sounds that way. The MoDavises each penned seven songs on Lover, their full-length debut for Schwenkville's Park the Van Records, an album chock-full of jaunty melodies, spirited harmonies, wiry guitar riffs and herky-jerky rhythms.
Since the album's spring release, the Teeth have won accolades from Spin and Rolling Stone, as well as more surprising sources. They have followed in the footsteps of label-mates and frequent touring partners Dr. Dog to become the Philadelphia alt-pop buzz band of the moment.
"The Teeth," declared fashionista magazine Marie Claire, "are for people who relish music and life."
Such zesty enthusiasm is understandable with Lover (*** ½), which opens with bassist Peter MoDavis' "Molly Make Him Pay," a Red Bull-fueled carnival romp that advises its heroine to turn the tables on a deceitful guy: "Have your fun and have them all, break their hearts and break your fall!"
After a dozen more sometimes calm, sometimes caterwauling tracks, Lover closes with guitarist Aaron MoDavis' comparatively placid "That Light Always Goes Out," in which he sings over a tinkling keyboard: "You've got too many ideas building up inside of you, and they're coming out your shoes, and there's no one to show them to."
There was no sign of musical ideas coming out of the MoDavises' sneaks, however, when they sat in Rittenhouse Square last month on the day after their 27th birthday. It was also the day before they headed out on a national tour that comes Saturday to the North Star Bar.
And there was no sign of competitiveness, either, between fair-haired Aaron and his black-clad brother, who tends to look taller because of his modest Mohawk.
The brothers, who grew up in Bethlehem before coming to Philadelphia to study at Temple, don't see eye to eye on everything.
"I don't like Roy Orbison as much he does," says Peter, who lives in Center City and can't get enough of James Brown. Aaron, who has an apartment in West Philly and is a Burt Bacharach fan, can't share his brother's enthusiasm for the Velvet Underground.
But the duo have been making music since their early teens, in a band Peter recalls as being "a little grungy" and Aaron remembers as having a song "about a clown who killed himself." Neither can remember that band's name, but since arriving at Temple, where Aaron took art classes (that's his landscape with a decapitated self-portrait on Lover's inner sleeve) and Peter studied literature, their focus has been the Teeth.
The band also includes drummer Jonas Oesterle and guitarist Brian Ashby. A blues and rockabilly enthusiast and fellow Bethlehem native, Ashby seized the microphone for a frenzied encore rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis' "High School Confidential" during a typically energetic recent free show at Jefferson Square Park in South Philadelphia.
"He's our secret weapon," Peter MoDavis says.
Chris Watson, who runs Park the Van, encountered the Teeth in 2002, the year they recorded The Christmas City EP, a joint effort with members of Dr. Dog, who were then called Raccoon. (The eight-song set is available on iTunes.)
"Any time there's a band with keen attention to harmonies and melody, I'm kind of a sucker for it," says Watson, who also issued the Teeth's 2005 EP Carry the Wood.
"When I first got to know them, I didn't realize that the brothers were twins," says Watson, whose label roster includes another melodic Philadelphia band, the Capitol Years.
The MoDavises are "extremely similar, yet constantly at each other's edges. Peter's songs tend to be more direct, a little more abrasive, scratching for an instant reaction. Aaron's tend to be more cryptic, a little more brainy, like he's been thinking about these things for so long."
The band of brothers the Teeth are compared to most frequently is the Kinks, the first-generation British Invaders led by songwriter Ray and guitarist Dave Davies, who specialized in wry, observational vignettes and could rock with power-chord swagger.
Which both MoDavises can agree on. The similarity isn't startlingly clear, though, until "The Coolest Kid in School," Aaron's gently bouncy number about a poolside encounter. It sounds as if it could have come off the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, which is particularly amusing to its author because "I was trying to do Paul Simon on that one."
Like the Davies brothers, the MoDavises have been known to have squabbles. "It can be tough, because you're working with a family member, so you can say more than you would otherwise say," Peter says. "You're more brash and brutal. We never let things go. Aaron's more passive-aggressive and I'm the opposite, so I'll just keep talking at him and talking at him. . . . "
And does he ever blow up?
"Occasionally," says Aaron, bumming a Camel off his bro. Both work, along with Ashby, at a Powelton pizzeria when the band is not on the road.
"It's weird: When you grow up with your twin brother and have fights and everything through school and then you go into this huge thing together. . . .
"It can be pretty intense. The other guys think the band is going to break up all the time. But you're, like, partners forever. So you have to learn to work together. And I don't know how I would be able to work with someone who wasn't my brother now, and not be able to say things without worrying about stepping on toes."
The brothers worked obsessively on You're My Lover Now last year, with the aid of the local rock community, striving to find a balance between complex arrangements and the visceral energy they bring to the songs live.
Equipment was borrowed from indie-pop band Walker Lundee, whose Port Richmond rehearsal space was transformed into a studio. The Spinto Band's Nick Krill mixed the recording, and alt-hip-hop producer RJD2 was in-studio consigliere.
RJD2 - real name: Ramble John Krohn - introduced himself as a fan to Peter MoDavis in Rittenhouse Square one day last summer, and has touted the Teeth in many interviews. He's gone so far as to list the band as his favorite artists, ahead of the Zombies, the Beatles, Donnie Hathaway and Radiohead.
Such over-the-top praise from a hipster-tastemaker helped set off the buzz on Lover, which has only grown as more hipster-tastemakers have heard it and liked it. Because it's good.
And did the MoDavises realize that this album would be the one to put them on the map?
Peter shakes his head in self-doubt, but his brother is more confident.
"We've been working for this for a long time," Aaron MoDavis says. "We expected it for a while, but it's nice to get it."