Teeth & Tongue is the project of Melbourne singer-songwriter Jess Cornelius, who makes heady, steamy rock music, tours with fellow Aussie rocker Courtney Barnett, and whose new album Give Up On Your Health (written during a three month post-breakup stint in Iceland) is due out this September.
Cornelius has transformed her previous earthiness into electronic-tinged tracks like "Turn, Turn, Turn," a heavy pop track that turns unexpectedly punk and funky, premiering today on The FADER. I'm gonna turn around till it looks right, sings Cornelius with a sultry drawl, I'm gonna turn a blind eye until you give me what I want. The song crescendos in yelps of give me what I want.
In an email to The FADER, Cornelius told us how she and her band made "Turn, Turn, Turn":
The first half of "Turn, Turn, Turn" was actually written on an acoustic guitar. I wrote it while I was staying in West Brunswick, subletting a couple's bedroom while they spent a month in Europe. I took the song to the band one rehearsal, not really expecting it to go anywhere, and it was really just the first two verses. For laughs I started playing the note sequence on a trance-like arpeggiator keyboard, and moved the vocal phrasing around a little bit to fit. James started playing this great drum part with a clave and Damian started drawing on his dubious funk bass roots, and before we knew it we had this totally unexpected doof (electronic dance) number. It took a while to get the rest of the song together structurally, but Marc had come up with this guitar riff and that sort of informed some of the other parts. For a while, when we played the song live, we would segue into the Beach Boys's "Kokomo" halfway through, but that version never made it onto the record.