If the name and face of Slim Twig seem familiar to you-- assuming you're not a regular concert-goer in downtown Toronto-- it's probably because you recently took a chance on a rental of The Tracey Fragments, a bizarro 2007 psycho-drama from director Bruce McDonald in which Slim stars opposite a pre-Juno Ellen Page (but with background music provided by Broken Social Scene instead of the Moldy Peaches). I bring this up not to score quick Google hits from curious Ellen Page fans (though thanks for sticking for around if this is how you wound up here), but to suggest that knowledge of Slim's acting career goes some way to help understand the music he creates. Not all of it, mind you; as one half of Toronto garage-punk duo Tropics, Slim simply lets loose with a feral take on the Birthday Party's blitzkrieg blues. But the two releases that bear his own name-- the Derelict Dialect and Vernacular Violence EPs-- are more revelatory looks inside the actor's studio, capturing both the desire to cultivate a persona and extract an enduring mythology from it.
So fascinated is Slim with documenting the process of his own becoming that his first widely available release, Derelict Dialect (issued this past spring on Paper Bag Records), is essentially an odds-and-sods collection doubling as creation myth. The seven-song mini-album collects early experiments that would assume a more steely shape on the new Vernacular Violence EP, whose songs were recorded after the Derelict Dialect material, but several of which were actually first released beforehand last fall in a limited local run under the title of Whiite Fantaseee. Having approached Derelict Dialect after spending several months with the Whiite Fantaseee/ Vernacular Violence material, what's immediately striking is that, for recordings made months apart, the two relate very little to one another-- and that, depending on your perspective, Slim has either evolved or stripped his music down to its pure essence.
Derelict Dialect does introduce elements that would become more pronounced on Vernacular Violence: Slim's fondness for self-reflexive characterization (see: "The Austere Gentleman", an off-kilter ode to old-school virtues) and an overdriven analog-keyboard fuzz that immediately aligns him with an oft-invoked reference point, Suicide. But rather fasten him to that band's synth-punkabilly tradition and ascetic cool (that would come later), Derelict Dialect documents the messy process of, as Slim likes to call it, "songsculpting"-- where you're not sure what exactly you're creating until you take a step back from it. And even then you're not quite sure what you're looking at: "The Replica & the Martyr"-- Derelict Dialect's most intriguing and confounding track-- finds Slim leaning on his keys and harmonizing with himself in ominous monotone over a marital drum beat, only to switch up the game plan a minute in, leaving the original melody to defend itself against a ringing, repeated piano chord and a flurry of arrhythmic ticks.
Derelict Dialect's wobbly foundations-- a collapsing pawn shop of wheezing synths, beat-up acoustic guitars, and hiccupping drums-- are manifest in Slim's elastic voice, which assumes the devilish tenor of Liars' Angus Andrews ("The Replica & the Martyr", "Birthing & Birthing"), Dylan-esque nasally ascensions ("Trembeltongue") and even motor-mouthed hip-hopped spiel ("The Austere Gentleman"). But despite its occasional bouts of scatterbrained inscrutability, there is a certain logic at play here: the carnivalistic quality of that pervasive keyboard sound serving as an apt reflection of the songs' funhouse-mirror shapes.
Perhaps by design, "Trembletounge" closes out Derelict Dialect with two minutes of eerie, haunted-house organ drones-- a retroactive setting of the scene for Vernacular Violence's zombie a-go-go. While ostensibly more minimal in presentation than Derelict Dialect-- with that album's sea-sick rhythms replaced by precise drum-machine motions-- Vernacular Violence immediately feels more fleshed out: Slim sashays into the lounge-lizard lechery of "Brothl Hunting!" and the sleazy samba of "Tormen" with a newly perfected Nick Cave bellow that lends him a more creepy charisma, and a more coherent set of lyrical signifiers (shark skin suits, snake-oil salesmen) to better complement the grease in his pompadour. (Though curiously, the one new track that distinguishes Vernacular Violence from its previous Whiite Fantaseee edition, "Street Proposition", is a morose beatbox-troubadour warble that's more in line with Derelict Dialect's hermetic aesthetic.)
True to his self-referential persona, Slim explicitly outlines his transformation in "Gate Hearing!" which refashions the austere gentleman of old as "that elegant smoker with the hair so slick and styled that there ain't another man for at least 10 miles, baby." But for even more compelling evidence of Slim's progress, look no further than the EP's mesmerizing 10-minute centerpiece, "Whiite Fantaseee", in which Slim's growing confidence as a performer dovetails with his early interests in exploratory composition, producing a future-shocked junkie-punk epic that plays out like Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" re-cut with Lou Reed's "Street Hassle" string section. Atop a tick-tock beat that doesn't waver for the song's entire duration, Slim lets his voice echo through a desolate cityscape for two minutes before his repeated incantation of the song's title summons an overwhelming swirl of cellos and layer upon layer of intensifying synth drones; when Slim returns at the five-minute mark to shout out the song title again overtop this sinister symphony, his reverb-drenched voice trembles with the dread of someone who can't believe what he's wrought-- even the drum machine sounds a little spooked-- before the song slowly dissolves into a gothic funeral march. Never mind his multi-instrumental facility; like all fine actors, Slim Twig's real talent is making his fantassee feel so real.
