Twin River

Vancouver rockers Twin River released their debut album, Should The Light Go Out, early last year. Now they’re following it up with a new 7″ single, plus a second full-length to come later this year. A-side “Antony” switches out the tuneful garage-pop of their debut for something dreamier and grander, conjuring up some of the dusty, open-road majesty of the War On Drugs. “‘Antony’ marks a crossroads,” frontwoman Courtney Ewan told Consequence Of Sound, where the track premiered. “It’s the culmination of difficult conversations and tough decisions. It’s about becoming unglued, but picking yourself up at the same time. It’s looking forward, while looking back.” Listen below.

“Antony” b/w “I Don’t Want to Be Alone” is out 3/4 via Light Organ Records. - Stereogum

Prior to releasing their 2015 debut LP, Should the Light Go Out, Canada’s Twin River were on a bit of a self-imposed hiatus. The two creative forces behind the band, Andy Bishop and singer/guitarist Courtney Ewan, were in different cities in different provinces, with Bishop home in Vancouver and Ewan away at school in Montreal. Now that their big coming out is, well, out, however, the garage pop outfit is back in gear, already churning out new material for their forthcoming sophomore album.

Before that record drops later this year, they’ll preview the effort with a new 7-inch single. The A-side of the release, “Antony”, is a road warrior of an indie song, reverberating guitars echoing The War on Drugs as much as any jangle pop artist. The aesthetic comparison is a fitting road map for the song’s lyrical journey. “‘Antony’ marks a crossroads,” Twin River explain to Consequence of Sound. “It’s the culmination of difficult conversations and tough decisions. It’s about becoming unglued, but picking yourself up at the same time. It’s looking forward, while looking back.”

Take a listen below.

“Antony” and its B-side, the ballad “I Don’t Want to Be Alone”, are culled from 10 new tracks recorded with producer Colin Stewart (The New Pornographers, Black Mountain) that will make up Twin River’s second LP. The 7-inch is due out March 4th. - Consequence of Sound

Rating: 6.9, By Jayson Greene.

The Vancouver alt-pop band Twin River began as a somber folk duo, in which singer Courtney Ewan Bromley and guitarist Andy Bishop mostly sat "cross-legged on stools," as Bromley told CBC Radio, and harmonized quietly over acoustic guitar. But at some point, Bromley decided that sparse acoustic music bored her, so Twin River upstreamed to a bright-toned, swaggering synth-rock outfit. Their debut, Should the Light Go Out, savvily punches a few major stylistic buttons—poppy, swaggering, vaguely retro. Bromley has a great voice—sharp and dark-toned and instantly memorable—the sort that feels designed to cut through thick power chords. And they have a sure hand crafting tuneful rock songs, a couple of which ("Laugh It Off", "Bend to Break") cheerfully arm-wrestle you into first-listen submission.

The album sounds nice, in an immediate and familiar way: the crunch of the punky melodic guitars on "Bend to Break", the clean, starlit twinkles of synthesizer on "He’s Not Real and He Ain’t Coming Back". Should the Light Go Out is alluringly coated in reverb, so that the whole album sounds smeared rather than recorded, with Bromley’s voice stirring into the mix like brown sugar thickening water. But reverb is much like corn syrup: Put too much corn syrup in a drink and it tastes like corn syrup. Put too much reverb on an album and it tastes like reverb. Too many of Should the Light’s 10 songs just taste like reverb.

The blurry sense of distance tames some otherwise jagged, exciting rock songs into a pleasant air-conditioner hum. On "Word to the Wise", Bromley scoops notes in a low, guttural register, which are difficult to hear, and the zigzagging, flange’d guitar solo that drives the song to its peak sounds as faraway as a car crash on a muted TV news broadcast. The pogoing "Anything Goes" feels similarly sapped. Live clips of Twin River reveal a much more dynamic band, with a hint of Nashville twang and soul-rock heat that can’t really be discerned here. The closest we get is the slow 6/8 shuffle "It Won’t Be Long", which offers a chance for Bromley to belt, and lean into the whooping "drinkin’ alone" chorus.

Twin River the soulful, mainstream pop-rock band, which keeps threatening to break out of the record, is far more interesting than Twin River the au-courant synth-rock band, which takes up more space than it should. Some of the songs are so atmospheric and cool-sounding they almost forget to exist: The slow, deliberate "Golden Man", which helps itself to nine full minutes, brings to mind a leather jacket, maybe someone walking slowly, and the beat to "Be My Baby". It is difficult to tell if someone also wrote a song in there.

Again, the culprit here might (partly) be reverb. Bromley, from the same CBC interview: "I had this long saga in my head, lyrically, and there was nothing I could get rid of. I said, 'Sorry guys, we have to have six verses.'" Without the ability to parse nearly any of the song’s six verses, however, the song becomes an interminable, unchanging vista. Hobbes (the tiger/philosopher) once observed that being cool looked a lot like being bored, and it’s a look that doesn’t hang well on some people. - Pitchfork

Evolving from stripped-down folk to supernatural, punk-inspired rock music, Vancouver's Twin River has transformed over the past five years. The band began as a duo—consisting of Courtney Ewan Bromley and Andy Bishop—but has since grown into a five-piece, adding Dustin Bromley, Malcom Jack, and Rebecca Law Gray to the mix, resulting in surf-infused tunes reminiscent of the '60s and filled with influences from rock goddess Stevie Nicks, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and more.

In 2011, Twin River released their Rough Gold EP—a folk-tinged foray into the world of rock. This time around, however, the band's debut full-length record, Should The Light Go Out, introduces a more full-bodied and developed sound. Here, we are pleased to exclusively premiere the voodoo-infused rock track "Word To The Wise" from the forthcoming LP. Twin River's Courtney Ewan Bromley also spoke with us about supernatural stories, the band's musical transition, and going with the flow.







ILANA KAPLAN: Can you tell me a little bit about "Word To The Wise?"

COURTNEY EWAN BROMLEY: It's one of the first songs we wrote for the new record. It was one of the first ones we wrote as a full band. If I could pinpoint any kind of shift in our sound, it would be seen in this song. So, this is a good song to talk about.

KAPLAN: How did you loop in the other band members?

BROMLEY: It kind of happened supernaturally. It helps that we were all friends previously. The Vancouver music scene is small enough, so if you play in a band for a long period of time, you're going to meet everyone else who is doing the same thing. At the time when Andy and I recorded our 7-inch called Rough Gold, we recorded it with Malcom who is now our bass player, but we just contacted him for the recording. We recorded it as a two-piece in his living room and we had Rebecca, who is now in the band, pop by to do vocals. The last day of recording Andy and I got offered opening spots for Julie Doiron. We were moving away from the idea of a two-piece and we had just finished the work with Malcom and Rebecca. We asked them if they wanted to play the show with us, and if it [went] well, we could talk to them about being in a band. So, that was how we did the first show, and our drummer, Dustin, was the last puzzle piece. He had asked to join the band a couple of times, but we were kind of sitting on the fence for a while. He found us, but we found the others.

KAPLAN: Do you have a theme resonating throughout your new record?

BROMLEY: That's a hard thing. There's definitely a noticeable shift with us as a band on this record. In the simplest terms, it just doesn't sound like our last demo. I don't think it sounds the way people were used to us sounding. That's a big shift. I think it mimics what was going on in my own life, and I think the title speaks best to that idea, "Should the light go out?" It's an idea of questioning, a "What if?" We kept thinking, "What if we do this and that?" which I think is largely in part to me being a crazy OCD planner person. I got to a certain point where I was like, "This is silly and there's no benefit in planning everything." That's why I liked the title so much. There's no benefit in going crazy thinking about those things. We just went in and did what we wanted to do. A big goal of this record was to sound not so over-rehearsed because it was a great leap from our beginning material. We wanted to do what came in the moment. We just went in and came up with what we came up with, if that makes sense.

KAPLAN: Obviously, twin is the first word in your band name. There are so many bands that have the word twin in them: Twin Shadow, Mr. Twin Sister, Twin Forks, Twin Limb, Twin Peaks, etc. Why did you ultimately choose a band name with twin in it?

BROMLEY: Andy and I have been playing since late 2009, early 2010. There weren't quite the multitude of ‘twin' bands like we have right now. I think it came out of us being a two-piece. Andy and I had band practice one day, and we thought, "We better come up with a name for this." At the time, I was fixated on the duo aspect of us, and the name he came up with the name Deep River. So we combined them into Twin River. I'm sure there were a ton of twin band names five years ago, but it didn't seem like such an overwhelming number like it does right now.

KAPLAN: With "Word To The Wise," I hear a spookiness behind the track. Are you very inspired by supernatural things?

BROMLEY: I love spooky shit. I'm all about that kind of stuff. I'm actually a classicist, so I work on Latin literature and I mostly do Latin tragedy. I've never really thought of it being an inspiration, but I guess for the way my voice sounds, the spookier, the weirder and more supernatural shit, the better. I never thought about it for the way my voice sounds, but I definitely have seen it for my mood.

KAPLAN: What's the scariest thing you've seen in your study of classic literature?

BROMLEY: There is a lot of weird religious, sacrificial shit they did back in the day. My favorite play is Thyestes—it's written by Seneca. It's about two brothers and one pisses off the other and in retaliation, he cooks his nephews and feeds them to his brothers. The language that the author uses to describe all of the blood and guts is very visceral. If you read it in Latin, you can hear the crunching bones and tearing limbs. It's super gross and awesome. I don't think a lot of people think about that when they think of Latin scholars. I think people think it's weird what I chose to do.


TWIN RIVER'S SHOULD THE LIGHT GO OUT WILL BE RELEASED FEBRUARY 17 VIA LIGHT ORGAN RECORDS. - Interview Magazine

"Secret in a Seance" is one of the slickest songs from Twin River's new record, boasting the perfect amount of layered pop mixed with twang. With vocals that float atop sliding guitar, the chorus builds and sends you down a waterslide of "oooh's" that will make you want to do that scuba diver dance—you know you know, the one where you plug your nose and wave your arms up and down. That one! You get it. And honestly, what more could you really want in a song anyway?

We are premiering "Secret in a Seance" below, from Twin River's upcoming record Should The Light Go Out, slated for a February 17 release. - Noisey