Color Your Life.

Twin Sister: their songs are pretty, they’re light, they’re very airy. &, but actually, No they're not. Because they can also be kind of angular & dark & dissonant, even. In fact Noisy enough, on at least one occasion, to have provoked actual controversy in my household. Oh, & but don’t forget bouncy. Frequently, they’re bouncy.

On the new EP, Color Your Life, Twin Sister’s songs continue to follow actual trajectories. They start out in one place, & then they go & they end up somewhere very much else. There’s really no predicting where they’re going to go along the way. &, actually, I’m not always immediately certain of where they’ve just been. So: Replay.

Earlier, I have said that Twin Sister makes (maybe deliberately) imperfect Pop. It occurs to me now that there is a fundamental, uh, inefficiency to these oddly-timbered & meandering songs. Which are therefore sort of the polar opposite of Pop. Ok, candidly: I’m not sure I understand yet what this music is or is trying to be. I’m not sure the band has a clear handle on that yet, either. To my ears, this music continues to teeter on the edge of coalescence. It hasn’t yet settled into whatever it’s going to be.

By way of a digressive (& admittedly oversimplified) analogy, I will cite to Talking Heads, circa 1977. From the perspective of the music they emulated (which was Funk), their efforts were clumsy, rudimentary, unsuccessful. Along the way though, they made something wholly fresh & genuinely thrilling. That's what I'm trying to get at when I say that the best feature of Twin Sister's version of Pop is that it's done sort of wrong.

At this point, I can’t always clearly discern where Twin Sister are coming from or where they’re going. But they’re evidently getting very busy, & I think they’re going to do some very interesting things. I’m on the edge of my seat.

In the meantime, Color Your Life is eccentric, surprising, fun, & (for now) free. For the next week or so, the download is gratis at the band’s website. But I can go ahead & start you off right here:

TS - Milk & Honey (mp3)

Go, go.

Check this: “All around and Away We Go” is an early leak from Twin Sister’s upcoming mini-album on Infinite Best Recordings, to be called Color Your Life. Once again, this is a band that delights in coloring outside the lines.

OK, so I get now that I should expect to be surprised by Twin Sister, but still: I did not anticipate this post-proto-disco-techno vamp référant w/the airy-sexy vocal. & after getting my sea legs on that, I certainly did not expect the little feedback interlude at ~2:20, punctuated incongruously by what I had already sussed was not some stranger’s errant ringtone. That 22 seconds of ambient whisper at the ending ices the cake nicely, nicely.

You just may have heard it first here:

TS All Around & Away We Go (mp3)

Sister, Sister

First off I’ll just go ahead & ask, rhetorically, how anybody could not love this album cover.

Vampires with Dreaming Kids is a 4-song EP from NYC band Twin Sister. Some very interesting, very quirky songs here, & the band’s website makes a lot more material available for quick & easy download. So check that out.

I enjoy Twin Sister quite a bit. These are Pop songs, yes, but they are (& this is definitely a Plus) highly-imperfect ones. As with a lot of young(ish) bands, one can’t reliably discern whether they’re deliberately flouting the conventions, or simply missing the mark. Either way, the net effect here is novel, delightful. The songs are clever & surprising.

e.g., “I Want a House” starts out murky & plodding, only to shimmer inexorably up & out from the gloom. By two minutes in, the song is nothing but sunshine, floating & bouncing, daring you not to turn cartwheels.

download here:

TS - I Want a House (mp3)