Getting so obsessed with a band that you book a local show just to see them play—we need more freaks like that in the world, and that’s what Merge Records’ Mike Krol did this spring when he put together a bill featuring himself, Shannon Shaw’s new group Voilà!, and this not-so-known New Orleans duo Twisted Teens, Krol’s recent fixation, here in Los Angeles. “I blasted it in the car at night with the windows down, tracked down records, mailordered merch like I was 16, and all of a sudden I felt excited about THE CREATION OF MUSIC again,” he wrote on Instagram. “I couldn’t believe a band I didn’t even know existed at the beginning of this year made—quite possibly—my favorite record of the past 2 decades.” Amen, Mike. This shit tears.
New Orleans is a fascinating place. Catch the alluvial floodplains along the nearby Mississippi River on the right day and they’ll rise higher than the houses. Parades and buskers fill the streets, magnolias and irises bloom all over, and characters speak in Cajun, Creole, and Yat tongues. There’s a conversation happening there, in a local music scene not yet overrun by industry. Zydeco, swamp pop, and folk balladry offer a guidemap to the region’s economic and migratory patterns, and Twisted Teens lands somewhere in all of that, with their country-fried punk conduction. It’s steel-guitar music banging against garage walls. Twisted Teens are either punks who play country music or cowboys who play punk music. The answer just depends on which part of their sound hits you first.
On Blame the Clown, it’s the punk part. “Razor” Ramon (RJ) Santos’ pedal steel tarries and bleats beneath Caspian “C-Bird” Hollywell’s nervy chants. Each song features Twisted Tweens playing two entirely different ones until the chordal lines interlock; even when the duo’s style turns gentle, Caspian’s rasp’s got a mean tick to it. The album’s been “out” since last year, via cassette tapes and chip-board jacketed vinyl that Caspian and RJ were slinging on tour (there was a rip of it on YouTube for a while), but the good stuff is finally on streaming platforms and dedicated to “Mother the Earth, resist psychic death,” according to the Bandcamp liner notes. “Is It Real?” warms up Twisted Teens’ crescent brew of two-chord fundamentals and damp steel-string bends. Loquacious, fire-and-brimstone chords are strummed with a closed fist then sedated by RJ’s crybaby glissando, and it’s intoxicating.
The beauty of RJ’s vibrato on “Wild Connection” pads Caspian’s frenetic, loose-lipped howl, and the Deslondes’ Howe Pearson even throws his drumkit on the pile. I can’t quit the sensual, lunchtime romp called “Little Seed,” as Caspian’s synth-cushioned guitars chase down a white-hot melody while RJ’s hands make the chroma sound like cursive. There’s even a cheeky interstitial dialogue done up in a vintage accent between their interplay (the “woah nelly!” part got a mid-headbang chuckle out of me). I feel similarly about “Hurricane,” the split-apart prize powering the engine of Blame the Clown’s potent second half, where the guitars drone like Caspian looted them from Warhol’s factory. Those tones’ll send you into psychosis, man.
Blame the Clown may be noisy but it’s detailed excellently: the riffola in “100 Bill is Gone” is fuzzed up and blown-out; there’s a “find my iPhone” sound embedded into the “Not Real” bars; the chugging, voltage-starved licks on “I Operate” break so anxiously they could make a teenager’s head go gray. “Circus Clown” sounds agitated like old-school punk until RJ’s steel drives by like a whistle and, suddenly, you’re thrown sideways into this barn-burning shoutabout that teeters on novelty surf-rock wigout. Now I understand why they call him “the razor.” Some of the record’s most compelling contents are its slow-burn outliers, like the barroom stomp of “Peekaboo Hand” or the folk-singer beauty of “White Hot Coal.” But in-between those, RJ’s spirals are braided into Caspian’s solo in “Who Could It Be?” By this point in the record, Krol’s glowing co-sign starts to feel like an understatement.
The band’s cup runneth over with head-bobbing, no-bullshit hits. “Marionette,” “tic tac toe,” and “when the wire get cut” made Twisted Teens an excellent debut two years ago, but Blame the Clown builds on the zip with muscular, emotive steel work and acerbic guitar vamps. It’s rare to find a band this good this early in their career, but Caspian and RJ blast without pretense, plugging themselves into whip-smart melodies, bean-can percussion, and nifty, out-of-pocket lyrical mouthfuls about circumcisions and puppets and dirty old men. I’d call it punk unbounded if not for all those threads of glassy, crying steel woven throughout Twisted Teens’ tintype lacquer. It’s like Raw Power-era Stooges doing Pete Drake, or something ultra-catchy and impossible. I don’t know what swamp Caspian and RJ crawled out of, and I don’t know how much I believe in “stars aligning,” but there’s no real reference for the music they make. Blame the Clown explodes like a stick of dynamite and leaves only a blur behind. [Chain Smoking/Jazz Life]
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
