My First Tooth are trying really hard to make you love them. They list amongst their influences both Neutral Milk Hotel and Okkervil River, so before I've even listened to the CD, I admire their musical taste, or at least their ability to pander to the indie press. They're the latest in a procession of Possessive Adjective Noun bands, most of them awesome, including My Morning Jacket, My Bloody Valentine, My Latest Novel... in fact, it's getting a bit boring now. Why not "The First Tooth", or something? "The" is back in, I hear.The sheer number of members (8 full-time contributors), rough, raw, ready sound, and less than glamorous roots (hello, Northampton!) make My First Tooth initially appear as a folk-mutation of Los Campesinos!, even down to that Campesinos trait of deceptive minimalism until they really hit you with a BIG BAND chorus. They manage a good early-Okkervil impression as well, particularly on 'Red Carpet Rides' which I like to imagine is a b-side from 'Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See' and sing along to it in my best Will Sheff impression. The problem is that while LosCamps lyrics self-deprecatingly surmise an entire generation of faux-romantics, destroying their hopes and dreams along the way, and Sheff creates entire worlds of words, crafting epic stories in four-and-a-half-minute songs, My First Tooth settle for predictably dour folk-fare. See: "I like to lie and watch the orange and blue sky through the raindrops that are filling my eyes." In itself it's not an awful lyric (though it is getting there), but what makes it so uninspiring - and this is the case with the entire E.P. - is the band's failure to do anything with it, to explain why we should care what colour the sky is, to transform a silly romantic image into an interesting and well-crafted metaphor, to make mawkish couplet into a touching vignette.The E.P. does have it's moments, and I definitely don't want these guys to stop, because I see a lot of potential - musically they sound great, with room to develop, and the lyrics will come eventually, with age, with maturity, with experience. And I definitely want more bands who name NMH and Okkervil River as their influences. 60%My FirstTooth on MySpace