Oh, to have our innards again be stirred by sounds of visceral, human music; to feel the welling excitations induced by rumbles of earnest, physical rock-n-roll.
So it is with giddy relief that we swing open wide our creaky doors to welcome the percussive bass bottoms, deftly lathed drums, and sinisterly insinuated guitar dissonance of Flood Twin to swoop in and rescue us all from this sensory deprivation chamber.
And to announce their arrival, frontman and bass player Grant W. Curry reminds us in the album’s opening track, “People,” that:
“There’s no in-between, that means a fucking thing.”
It doesn’t matter how these three guys found each other, but it was a hallowed day when they did. Each man here wields his instrument with a distinctive panache. The drummer, and mono-appellatived Sterling, works his stripped-down tubs-and-skins with the reckless precision of a top-flight tail-gunner. He picks up where Wire’s beat man, Robert Gotobed, left off, playing only kick, snare, and high-hat from whence he veers into the realm of the industrial with recollections of Tom Waits/Latin Playboys found-object punctuation and carefully curated samples. There is not a lot of dazzle and flash here, just a sturdy undergirding for the band to ride on.
Guitar man J. Leslie Hedberg weaves his way through the arpeggios of diminished chords with the skill of Dexter Morgan dissembling a rival. Don’t come here looking for scaly, wanky soloing though; you won’t hear it. What you will hear is adroitly integrated metallic guitar textures with the occasional dub-laced upstroke.
Bassist/vocalist Grant W. Curry, who you will correctly peg as he of New Orleans bands James Hall, and Pleasure Club, reminds us what a bass should sound like: prominent in the mix, at that register right where menace melds with music.
So it is with giddy relief that we swing open wide our creaky doors to welcome the percussive bass bottoms, deftly lathed drums, and sinisterly insinuated guitar dissonance of Flood Twin to swoop in and rescue us all from this sensory deprivation chamber.
- Tournier Regare