Twinemen are serene, dreamy, sexy

Gentle, controlled sounds slowly introduce an apparent pop-rock track with a bit of funk about itself until saxophone starts weaving its magical jazzy thread through ‘Spinner’. ‘Little By Little’ succeeds it with a darker melody echoing with a World music that casts spells left, right and all-round. And then, ‘Harper and The Midget’ picks up its electro-beat and one’s limbs obligingly start to move to its infectious tempo, all the way to the concluding visit to a (scented) country garden roaming ‘Who’s Gonna Sing’.

This is a wondrous soundarama of Twinemen’s self-titled album and the idea was to make recordings that can’t easily be classified. They’ve certainly found the way to make reviewer’s life a living hell (as if it ain’t already under a great stress with all the crap landing on one’s desk) but this is such a pleasure of pain, it ‘tortures’ with mellifluous tonal feast, it coerces with beauty, its brutality is hormonal.

Twinemen are the surviving members of the superb outfit Morphine that tragically ended with passing of singer Mark Sandman three years ago. Dana Colley and Bill Conway were left with a great legacy but without a band. In the year after Sandman’s death, they put together Orchestra Morphine, a nine-piece rollicking celebration of the work of Morphine, and toured the US and Italy. One of the members of the collective was Laurie Sargent to whom they turned for this venture.

She brings them vocal range capable of handling differing styles, soulful singing and an eye-easy focus. Sargent certainly moves through genres, although most of them could be classed as ‘experimental’: these are mostly ambient pieces that rarely confirm to traditional song format, which prompted Sargent to comment, “It’s probably the most unstructured music I’ve ever played.” Conway talked in an interview about “open endedness” of this group: “We left the door open for any direction we wanted to take.”

This music is of free spirit, it makes you feel liberated and lets you mind wonder around its sonic frontiers for self-imaging, interpret it according to your present mood. Twinemen communicate in tones as much as via lyrics.

Morphine were Thom Yorke’s favourite band and hopefully ‘Men have remembered to send a copy to the Radiohead frontman to relax and chill out, the poor mite!

8/10