Meet Toothless. He's a dude called Ed Nash who's spent most of his natural born life playing bass in English indier than indie band Bombay Bicycle Club. After 11 years together (they started when they were still in school), they've decided to go on a little hiatus and so Nash is free to explore his solo tendencies under the guise of Toothless—named after a Raymond Pettibon drawing which features a tiger biting off a boy's head with the caption, 'Even toothless, she can still bite off a boy's head." So there you go. Below is the premiere of "Sisyphus," a song that's perkier than a parakeet on fleek. But there's a little bit more to the song than giddy indie pop hooks."Sisyphus is a Greek myth about a man whose punishment is to roll a boulder up a hill every day only for it to roll back down," explains Nash. "I wanted to write a song with this story as the basis, but for it to be about a relationship between two people, not an individual's daily struggle. This song is about always being there for someone no matter how many times they mess up, and no matter how inevitable it is that they will do it again."Sisyphus was the last song that I recorded for The Pace Of The Passing and it very nearly didn't make the cut. For about a year it existed as a terrible J-pop style recording that I loved but everyone else absolutely hated. After months of persuasion, I recorded this version. Am very pleased they persisted!"Nash's aforementioned debut LP, The Pace of Passing, which also features the likes of Wild Beasts' Tom Fleming, Marika Hackman, and The Staves, is out on Island Records on January 17th. It's not a concept record per se, but it is a rather meticulously constructed in that the album and its accompanying artwork, is a narrative that tips its cap to the infamous 1977 Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames—a short dealing with "the relative size of things in the universe and the affect of adding another zero." The camera pulls away from a picnicing couple, and zooms out, and out again, and again, and then some. Mythology and astrology also weave their way into the record, but anyway, that's a treat for next year. For now, listen below.
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