Album Reviews

Fans of operatic melodies and theatrical flourishes will gravitate to A Thousand Shark's Teeth.  The second LP release from New York’s My Brightest Diamond is all that and then some underground rock, too.  It’s also coated in a clear sheen of classical music.  Uh huh, there are a lot of adverse sounds going on here.  Much like on the band’s previous effort, Bring Me the Workhorse, multi-instrumentalist front-woman Shara Worden tries her darnedest to cram all she can into her new 12-track aural rollercoaster.  What results is at once engaging and sadly off-putting.

Worden, often a ringer for Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, whispers over swelling violins.  She bellows over the gentle twinkling of keyboards.  She spends one moment getting seductive and slinky in the shade of a trip-hop beat, and the next, she whips her vocals octaves into the night sky.  There’s something to be said for spontaneity and risk in music—My Brightest Diamond will never be labeled unoriginal—yet A Thousand Shark’s Teeth will have you adjusting the volume seven times too many.  It sets a different mood with every track and, on occasion, more than one mood per track (“From the Top of the World”).  Sure, My Brightest Diamond is hands-down a band to experience; when Worden restrains her obvious talent, like on the equally lush and thunderous opener “Inside a Boy,” she can deliver good old-fashioned goosebumps.  But when she oversteps and breaks the mood, as Teeth so often does, it's grating.  Unfortunately, this is one Diamond that could be a little more polished whole. 

—Matthew Allard
06.25.08