The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast

On its fifth, most-engaging album, the duo create biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice.

The sound of semen, it turns out, is squishy and thin. Personal rape alarms? Chilling and shrill. A theremin played by snails? Hard to say. Those are just a few of the samples on Matmos' The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast, a collection of sonic portraits patterned after figures from a sprawling, eccentric…

More like a portable gallery installation than a mere album, Matmos' The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast is a collection of fascinating, fractured audio and visual portraits of ten prominent gay and lesbian figures, among them writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and musicians.

<p>; Ten 'sound biographies' of homosexual icons which sample the sound of burning flesh? Yes please, raves Simon Reynolds.</p>

For all of its insular, inscrutable put-ons, the album remains an endlessly fascinating piece of work.