AEM017 Twin Sister

You, dear reader (hope­fully you’re out there some­where), may be sur­prised to see me pen­ning a review of a pop band. I can’t blame you. Then again, Twin Sis­ter is no aver­age pop band. I first saw these guys open­ing for Megafaun at the Silent Barn last spring. Since then, my sup­port for them has been unwa­ver­ing, my praise of them hyper­bolic to the extreme. Towards the end of the show, the bat­ter­ing cho­rus of “Gin­ger” made me blurt out that this band was the Weezer of the 21^st Cen­tury. Granted, Weezer is still a band in the 21^st Cen­tury (sort of), but that sub­ject is too painful for me to pur­sue. I wasn’t link­ing them up with the embar­rass­ingly unself­con­scious goof­balls behind “Bev­erly Hills” and Radi­tude. I was think­ing of the endear­ing nerds who threw pure pop genius in the face of the dom­i­nant grunge and alter­na­tive rock par­a­digms. This was almost cer­tainly the whiskey talk­ing, but there’s an ele­ment of truth to my dumb dec­la­ra­tion. Twin Sis­ter are a true pop band’s pop band. There may not be any overt inno­va­tions in their music, but it’s so well con­ceived, so well crafted and, most impor­tantly, so well exe­cuted that you’d be fool­ish not to give their music a seri­ous listen.

A-side “Gin­ger” is a crash-course on every­thing the band does well. It starts off with a wave of tex­ture so simul­ta­ne­ously diaphanous and huge it feels like U2 hal­lu­ci­nat­ing in a cathe­dral. Insis­tent drums pound out a sim­ple rhythm on toms and snare, a tinny acoustic gui­tar creeps stealth­ily in the left head­phone, a beau­ti­fully cheap key­board holds down the bass line. It’s the ele­ment of restraint that makes the track so suc­cess­ful. The mar­riage of sophis­ti­cated tex­tures with stream­lined struc­tures makes for an irre­sistible hyp­notic thrust. By the time the gui­tar stabs creep in towards the end of the verse, you’re almost par­a­lyzed by bliss. Finally the cur­tain draws back, reveal­ing a cho­rus like a wave of melodic reverb. At times it sounds like bouncy gui­tar pop of the Smiths slowed down to the speed of a slow-moving liq­uid. In a word: heav­enly. They wisely ride out the cho­rus to vic­tory, throw­ing in a beau­ti­ful gui­tar solo and a goosebump-inducing har­mony of the words “I love you.” If it sounds corny on paper, get thee to a lis­ten­ing sta­tion and revel in great pop’s trans­for­ma­tion of the famil­iar into the unfamiliar.

B-side “I Want a House” goes for drier sonic ter­ri­tory. “I want a house built of old wood,” intones Andrea Estella. “You can paint it any color you like, so long as I can live with you.” At once naïve and cal­cu­lat­ingly obses­sive, this sim­ple request becomes haunt­ing when paired with a quiet tom-pattern and a ring­ing, sitar-like key­board tone. Fol­low­ing “Gin­ger,” the tune grad­u­ally adds sub­tle texture—some quiet bells here, a cho­rus of stag­gered voices there—before milk­ing the foun­da­tional groove for all it’s worth. The lat­ter half of the song is sim­ply badass, almost rem­i­nis­cent of a less junkie-bummed Sly Stone. Dare I say, funky?

I spoke with gui­tarist and vox­man Eric Car­dona about the his­tory and future of the band. “We’ve been together one year and a half, but have been want­ing to do this for about 5 years. We were always in dif­fer­ent bands, and were each oth­ers favorite mem­bers. Our main influ­ences range from many dif­fer­ent things– all of our friends, John K. especially.….Kate Bush, Yel­low Magic Orches­tra, Cocteau Twins, CAN,  Hayao Miyazaki movies, Cats (not the play, we really really love our cats), Roy Orbi­son, things like that. Our new EP, Aquarel­las, will hope­fully be done before the new year, we’ve been work­ing very hard on it. We started out very into our record­ings, but bal­anc­ing that out and get­ting tight with more sex­ual live per­for­mances is our next move, play­ing lots of shows, etc. In the next phase of us we hope to become bet­ter at being a band.”

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — Ginger Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — I Want a House Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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