Don't be fooled by the understated nostalgia in the name of Missing Teeth's partial discography Same ol' Brew Re-bottled. After being thrashed, bashed and bruised at two Missing Teeth shows in Auckland over the last two months I can tell you theirs is a presence sorely missed around town. But roughly four years after breaking up the Teeth briefly reunited, played their brains out, and then left us with a sweet album to re-remember them by.
Naturally working in chronological order, the Same ol' Brew Re-bottled is a culmination of the band's recordings, beginning with the Self-Titled debut album (2002). Recorded when they were "some shitty ska band" (their words, not mine), there are just too many ridiculously catchy songs in this first 23 minutes and 24 seconds to name them all. Seriously... David Bain, Tricky Dick, Unfinished Business, Bite Fite, Six Pac Max... undoubtedly a pattern in the anthemic-chorus naming convention, but in an off-the-chain fun kinda way.
There is a notable change in style when it comes to the Disaster EP (2003) that follows, and Missing Teeth sound much more a straight up and down hardcore punk act in these 10 tracks. Part of the charm of this recording is the ganged-up vocals; it kinda feels like you’re in someone's living room, where everyone and anyone is standing up to yell down the microphone. Intimate like. Disaster was the EP that gave us No Way Out, a song that spent a healthy length of time in the bFM charts. Nearly a decade on and it has aged well, but it's not the only ace in the pack, and again, we have a handful of great tracks I could list off. (Archie Blue and Only Forwards are at the top of the deck, incase you are wondering.)
From here the rest of Same ol' Brew gets choppier and is filled with other unreleased tracks and demos that apparently came from a biscuit tin under Dave's bed or some such. This includes the 7-inch Spliff (2006), the Picture Disc 7-inch (2007), three 'Pick of the litter Tracks', and 6-inch Hexplit, in that order. Then to top it all off we have a sprinkling of early Missing Teeth demos. My pick here would have to be the rugged version of Bite Fite, with horns courtesy of Tom Anderson (ex The Managers).
The sheer epic nature of this volume is such that the band has squeezed on everything they could fit on an 80-minute disc. 44 songs in total. Perhaps at the expense of their second, and last, full length album Ill Gotten Gains (2007), which has been excluded from the compilation. Though I'm unsure why they didn't make it a double disc and cram it all on there. At any rate, the release of Same ol' Brew must be a relief for long-timey fans of the band many of whom had probably lost, broken given away or had stolen their Teeth collections in the five year release hiatus.
