One of last year’s most undeniable strokes of musical genius happened at the conclusion of Twin Sister’s Color Your Life: the disorienting, shifting frequencies (yes, frequencies, nothing more nor less) of “Galaxy Plateau” give way to a rising series of notes and a bitcrushed beat that transform instantly, with no interruption of a metronomic tick, into the full, vivid, colorful life of “Phenomenons.” But the ringing guitars remain a little mute, announcing a tentative but joyful waking. “I’m in a clear room; everything is making sense,” sings Andrea Estella, and we believe it’s for the first time, after the infinite, strange-making preceding half hour.
In Heaven, Twin Sister’s new proper debut, begins with bells of limitless reverberation, and for a moment you might think the album will take us on a similar journey through a twilight realm toward sudden sight, but then the opening tones melt into the rhythm track, sort of a downbeat, bottomless Saint Etienne, with all the most immediately gratifying elements pushed to the front of the mix, and it’s clear we’ll be treated with something less diffuse, more delineated.
The joy and magic of “All Around & Away We Go,” Color Your Life’s presumptive standout, was that you never quite knew where to focus your listening. The vocals were so vaporous, and there was such a lot of ether to cut through to get to the bass line’s deep groove. In Heaven proposes a smoother glide for the listener, but there’s some bleed-over from the bleedy style of Color Your Life. The echo-y chanting of “All Around” finds a counterpart in the Kim Gordon “Tunic”-isms of “Space Babe”—those goodbyes, cartoonish though they are, sound a lot like Kim’s hellos to Janis, Elvis, et al. In Heaven rewards both active and passive listening, balancing such easily heard nuance and other layering that escapes immediate notice with a new attention to clean surfaces.
Even simple math suggests that something has changed: Color Your Life gave us six songs in 30 minutes; In Heaven’s ten songs total a mere 35. The patient unfolding of Color Your Life’s weird suite has been exchanged for a perhaps more practical approach, ten quick dives into ten distinct waters. Twin Sister have an advantage in their new efforts: they come from Long Island, of course, because where else could a band internalize so much music history and play it back so un-self-consciously, so transmuted and unfamiliar? They work in moods, with a sort of intuitive, willful forgetfulness of all they’ve heard, so there’s not much on In Heaven that’s melodically recognizable or musically referential, beyond the New Order guitar of “Space Babe” and spy movie riff of “Spain.”
They sound most comfortable at their most subdued and least flamboyant, at those times when the music refuses to flaunt style or fashion, but they’re a band of many talents and invisible assimilations. Advance single “Bad Street,” proving the band’s disco affinity so boldly renewed, suggested In Heaven might be a party record, and even in its new context the song’s structural perfection—establish the groove, establish the tics, intensify the groove, layer the tics and reach a breaking point, break it down, and end with enigmatic, food-for-thought rhymes—attests its no fluke, that a club classic is within the band’s abilities. But the In Heaven we have, not the one we dreamed, ends up more likely than Screamadelica to head for inner space, more eager to come down than to come together.
Every part of “Bad Street” is breathtakingly crisp, necessarily so, but on other songs the album’s very sensible mixing gets counterbalanced by the vocals, which have that modern quality of being sung very close to the microphone, almost inside the listener’s ear canal, but still rendered a bit obscure. Here they sound like they’re being sung against the vibrating edge of a thin piece of paper. That’s true both for Estella and for Eric Cardona, whose voice we haven’t recognized on a proper release since “Nectarine” (from 2008’s Vampires With Dreaming Kids). In every perceivable way he’s the nominal twin sister of Estella, though on “Stop” he’s like Dan Bejar to his duet partner’s Sibel Thrasher. And he’s with us through the big, rattling climax of closer “Eastern Green” and its desolate, yawning coda, softening the dislocation.
That’s the album’s boldest flight of fancy, residue of last year’s freely formed triumphs. Here’s the rare debut that marks an evolution already in progress. We have now the song-oriented point of entry for a great new band. Color Your Life wasn’t the build-up, but a one-off masterpiece of self-contained non-prophecy, the kind Radiohead have expressed interest in one day making. With In Heaven, the hopeful pop mainstays begin.
