{"id":3912,"date":"2015-02-18T17:58:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T22:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=3912"},"modified":"2015-02-18T17:58:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T22:58:17","slug":"range-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/18\/range-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"Range Anxiety."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My <a href=http:\/\/klaw.me\/1L9RKE9>review of the boardgame Evolution<\/a> went up on Tuesday over at <i>Paste<\/i>. I&#8217;ll hold my first <a href=http:\/\/klaw.me\/1vHkNGc>Klawchat<\/a> of February on Thursday at 1 pm ET.<\/p>\n<p>The Twerps hail from Australia, where weird indie music seems to be quite readily accepted as normal. I described them recently as pleasantly annoying, which is much better than annoyingly pleasant, and that phrase fits their second album <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B00SNOOX1M\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=390957&#038;creativeASIN=B00SNOOX1M&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=meadowpartyco-20&#038;linkId=MCRRKCJJKQ2W436Q\">Range Anxiety<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=meadowpartyco-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=B00SNOOX1M\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/><\/i> (in addition to their eight-song 2014 EP <i>Underlay<\/i>, which included \u201cHeavy Hands,\u201d #42 on my list of <a href=http:\/\/klaw.me\/1zKgTAN>the top 100 songs of last year<\/a>) as well as everything that came before. The quartet craft short, catchy jangle-pop songs around a single hook each, and their singing styles are the polar opposite of the sanitized auto-tuned music that fills American pop radio playlists \u2013 to a fault, sometimes, as the Twerps don&#8217;t care if they&#8217;re a bit off key.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.spotify.com\/?uri=spotify:album:7HvsEhwXQhIGSa07bpyBmp\" width=\"300\" height=\"380\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The Twerps frequently cite Australian indie heroes the Go-Betweens and Dunedin Sound propagators The Clean as major influences, both quite obvious in their music, which also reminded me of American jangle-pop act Let&#8217;s Active and perhaps even early Aztec Camera \u2013 all of it from another era of alternative music entirely. Their own sound is a bit more stripped-down than even their earliest influences, minimal without becoming experimental, which fits their one-hook-per-song formula, a formula that works best when the Twerps keep things to about three minutes \u2013 true of all but two songs on the album, with one of those exceptions the lead single, \u201cI Don&#8217;t Mind,\u201d one of the worst tracks on <i>Range Anxiety<\/i> and not at all representative of what the band is capable of producing.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll direct your attention instead to \u201cBack to You,\u201d a more upbeat, jangly tune in line with \u201cHeavy Hands\u201d that introduces its point straight off with the line \u201cSomebody out there is doing better than me.\u201d The song has one riff, and about enough humor in the lyrics to sustain it for two and a half minutes \u2013 another thirty seconds and the song would have felt overlong. Julia McFarlane takes over lead vocals for the Sambassadeur-like \u201cStranger,\u201d another three-minute gem that leads into \u201cNew Moves,\u201d which sounds a bit like another Aussie indie-pop band, the Darling Buds, with a sunny guitar riff that contrasts with the muted vocal medley. McFarlane returns to the lead later in the album on the waltz \u201cShoulders,\u201d the most successful downtempo track on the album \u2013 primarily because of the strength of her strong yet understated vocals. \u201cCheap Education\u201d thrives off a simple guitar riff that gave me the sense that the whole song was spinning in circles, which I&#8217;d like to think was the whole point given the wordplay in the lyrics.<\/p>\n<p>The annoying part of their sound does take over from time to time, in large part because the male vocalists don&#8217;t like to stay on key very well, such as the positively irritating \u201cLove at First Sight,\u201d where I can only assume the band was trying to create some irony by layering fingernails-on-blackboard vocals over a pretty if slightly standard ballad. \u201cAdrenaline\u201d has the same problem \u2013 you should almost expect a Twerps song with that title to be more like a dirge \u2013 while closer \u201cEmpty Road\u201d runs about two minutes longer than it should have; although their attempt to build a song with multiple hooks and layers is admirable, it just doesn&#8217;t work out over five full minutes.<\/p>\n<p><i>Range Anxiety<\/i> truly isn&#8217;t for everyone \u2013 it&#8217;s the kind of album I would probably have rejected on first listen a decade ago, when I was much more closed-minded about music in general (I knew what I liked and didn&#8217;t see much reason to listen to anything else). It&#8217;s an album that rewards a little patience and the willingness to overlook the moments when the Twerps outfox themselves by overdoing the irony or singing out of tune, with solid payoffs in a half-dozen tracks that are minor pop jewels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My review of the boardgame Evolution went up on Tuesday over at Paste. I&#8217;ll hold my first Klawchat of February on Thursday at 1 pm ET. The Twerps hail from Australia, where weird indie music seems to be quite readily accepted as normal. I described them recently as pleasantly annoying, which is much better than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[803,763,167,852],"class_list":["post-3912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2015-in-music","tag-australian-music","tag-indie","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3913,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912\/revisions\/3913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}