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  DFA2472Long Player  £18.00

Label

DFA

Slim Twig

Thank You For Stickin' With Twig

'Thank You For Stickin' With Twig' is the latest longplaying album from the artist known to the world or at least to his mother as Slim Twig Coming out on DFA you may be surprised to know that it represents the fifth album by the Toronto based songwriter producer 'Thank You For Stickin' With Twig' is to date the most sonically immersive album in Twig's discography Where some records have focused explicitly on samplebased songwriting while others have been completely liverecorded the new album arrives at a perfectly produced fusion of fidelities It hovers glamorously caught between a cloud of obscurant halfspeed tape hiss and the most stoned Jeff Lynne production you've ever heard Twig flirts here with a variety of vibes most often opting for a three dimensional approach whereby a warped tape aura is overlaid with colourful lasercut keyboard and guitar melodies A fetishization of analogue texture is married to a digital approach All the while we find Twig irreverently raiding classic rock of its symbolism sexuality and social ambition for ulterior subversions In this respect 'Thank You For Stickin' With Twig's' closest cousin may be Royal Trux's Accelerator Opening cut 'Slippin Slidin' establishes itself as a cock rock analogue to Kanye West's similarly phallic 'On Sight' the bravura Yeezus introduction We are welcomed by a blast of synth noise soon followed by sexually agitated lyrics supported by Meg Remy whose vocals are featured prominently on much of the record atop a deafening beat distorted and sleazy The immensity of the production achieved in collaboration with coproducer Anthony Nemet and mixer Steve Chahley represents an evolution of Twig's approach sustained at a fever pitch throughout the album 'A Woman's Touch It's No Coincidence' is a song sympathizing with the perspective of the Beatles' wives The song production sounds like a fusion of dub and baroque pop as played by the cartoon band in the Yellow Submarine movie Many of the songs play referential sonic games like this discursively incorporating familiar melodies production styles or ideas a fuzzy ballad on wage inequality is cheekily titled 'Textiles On Mainstreet' only to pair them with incongruous textures or themes 'Live In Live On Your Era' a song encouraging an embrace of one's own cultural circumstance is consciously styled as the most 'retro' sounding cut on the album Jimmy Page leads and all seemingly upending the lyrical content On and on the jokes and metasonic rock commentary continue like so many Zappaesque indulgences The centrepiece of the album is composed of two songs sharing the middle of the running time 'Roll Red Roll Song For Steubenville' titled after the football chant of the eponymous town's high school team eulogizes the tragedy of the young girl who was the tabloid subject of group sexual abuse by said football team Its opening the most tranquil dreamy instrumental passage on the record is harshly interrupted by a mass of pitchshifted martial drums and wildly panned distorted fuzz lines The disturbed atmosphere composes a sonic poem detailing a narrative through a combination of sound and oblique lyrics 'Everyone will love everyone will love the way you fold Roll Red Roll' Side B opens with 'Fog Of Sex NSIS' A cinematic fusion of plastic soul and flute scoreforhorrorfilm it comprises 'Thank You For Stickin' With Twig's' funkiest recording With voicings from both Twig and Remy sung from the perspective of someone unwilling to commit to a single gender identity the song makes overt the album's subliminal motive Instability is addressed from a disenfranchised perspective perhaps as a metaphor for the music itself which refuses to stabilize or stay put Twig himself has referred to his ambition of making 'a protest album as obscured by smoke' and what kind of smoke we wonder In swift combination these two songs make good on that claim The lyrical voices here take on an at times humorously proletarian tone 'I work a shift just up the street cleaning semen off of seats it's a way for ends to meet' that is alien in the contemporary rock landscape dominated as it is by reheated garage and psych leftovers The album closes with a triumphantly grandiose cover of Serge Gainsbourg's instrumental 'Cannabis' The aim is somewhat clearer now Slim Twig's latest modulation of voice is to recontextualize an era of ambition in produced rock music dislodging the hackneyed and clichA#d in the process Sonically and politically his aim is to be a rock n' roll subversive in an era where that claim should rightfully be made by luddite cavepeople Context is everything and Twig's gift may be in zeroing in on that He collages his sounds together here as eclectic as The Love Below or any Beck album in a continuum where pop criticism is always recycling through what it chooses to lend cultural currency if only for an instant As of now he's sized up rock n' roll and determined it seems as good as any other vessel to commandeer for his creative impulse Power to him Rock may be dumb as a stone but even so now and then it's smart to be dumb LP With Download

Tracklist

• 1. Slippin' Slidin'
  2. A Woman's Touch (It's No Coincidence)
  3. She Stickin' With Twig
  4. Textiles On Mainstreet
  5. Stone Rollin' (Musical Emotion)
  6. Roll Red Roll (Song for Steubenville)
  7. You Got Me Goin'...
  8. Fog of Sex (N.S.I.S.)
  9. Fadeout Killer
  10. Trip Thru Bells
  11. ...Out of My Mind
  12. Live In, Live On Your Era
  13. Cannabis