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I've always wanted to use that title, Sam Beam says of Hen's Teeth, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. InchI just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen's teeth do not exist. And that's what this record felt like a gift that shouldn't be there but it is.Inch Hen's Teeth and his previous album, Light Verse, are siblings of a sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a year-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. InchI'm at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot more important to me. I'm a lot freer and I love making music more than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for your luck and try your best.Inch In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins they share DNA and complement each other, but are defined as much by their differences as their similarities. Light Verse (2024) took it's name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humor, and nonsense. It's a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. The world of Hen's Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like InchRoses,Inch InchRobin's Egg,Inch InchDates and Dead People,Inch InchSinging Saw.Inch The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life - a surreal scene that contrasts starkly with the cool blue-white palette of Light Verse. As for the music, Beam says InchThe experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years on
