MUSIC BLOG

Window Twins

• Author: None
• Published: Friday, February 27, 2009

WINDOW TWINS
I'm This Tall City
(Howell's Transmitter; 2009)

Window Twins' debut, I'm This Tall City, is a complex and rewarding album. The songs are mostly composed of dense layers of ambient and found sound, but the tunes are still catchy. Real catchy - even if they are mostly idiosyncratic as all hell. There are plenty of memorable melodies and simple but effective beats to provide points of access, if you're listening right. But it's one of those albums that make you feel like it's almost a travesty to even try and describe it, the music is so hard to describe and speaks so eloquently on its own.

Nonetheless, allow me to attempt to describe it.

Opener "Maybe It's Time" showcases the overarching, conflicting aspects of layered experimental noise and pop accessibility, with one of the most infectious vocal hooks of the album on top of a laid-back hip hop beat and organ, piano, bells, bass, and other less-identifiable sounds. The lyric that provides the album's title is also one of the most impossible melodies to get out of your head: "Hey there, voice, please just let me be / You're so small, I'm this tall city."

The lyrics are often surreal bordering on abstract, but deeply evocative, providing just enough narrative to tell a story. I'm thinking primarily of "Purple Flies" here. The song kicks in almost nonchalantly after a brief interlude of strobing sound. Despite the subtlty, the song tells a strangely moving tale about a guy named Joey who "had a camper with three young wives / Parked it on an island in the middle of the world / Parked it by the nest of the Purple Flies." Joey, as it turns out, located his house near the eponymous insects even though he "Knew about the danger of the blind horse crew / Homicidal poets with poisonous eyes / Looking for the nest of the Puple Flies."

And if a line like that doesn't have you already clicking over to their website to buy this album, then you and I have nothing in common whatsoever, and nothing I could write will convince you that this album is awesome.

It's hard to tell if the song offers any resolution to this budding conflict between Joey and the blind horse crew, but then, that doesn't really seem to be the point. Just as the Window Twins' sound is something like sound collages crammed into pop structures - maybe I've got that backward, but at any rate, suffice to say there's as much a pop and folk influence as there is an experimental bent - the lyrics on "Purple Flies" are a barely-constructed fairy tale crammed into an impressionistic rendering of some nightmare world inhabited by purple flies and a gang of sightless homicidal poets who either ride horses or are horses, I'm not sure which.

The blind horse crew turns up again, one can assume, in the track "Blind Horses." And our beleaguered pal Joey would seem to reappear on the stage in "Joey Conductor." But it's not immediately clear if these songs are actually the continuation of some linear narrative. They're more like themes running through this magnum surrealist opus. But that's what's so brilliant about the album: Window Twins is, when you strip it down, just two guys laying noise over simple beats. And yet the album bears repeated listening, subtly revealing itself only to the intrepid listener who is worthy of the reward.

I'm This Tall City isn't a radical departure from the Twins' other projects - which include Black Fiction, Ray's Vast Basement , and The Fresh & Onlys. And yet it's like nothing else you've ever heard. With I'm This Tall City, Window Twins have definitely created an entirely unique sound and a thoroughly delightful album.

[Mike G.]


[STREAM] Window Twins: "Maybe It's Time", "Purple Flies"