Musicians tend to recoil at the term "side project," and with good reason. Calling a band or an album a side project suggests that it's a dabble, a dodge, an exercise that might be fun or instructive for the participants but only of passing interest to the audience. And if you've spent a lot of time (or even just a little) trying to create something, that kind of reduction is pretty annoying. Perhaps that's why these, ahem, "exploratory enterprises" seem to be treated with greater seriousness lately. Is Divine Fits a side project? How about Atoms for Peace? Didn't Gnarls Barkley start out as a partnership between artists known for other things, and then become the thing that made Cee-Lo Green and Danger Mouse mainstream stars?
The answers to these questions are: "Not really," "more so than Divine Fits but not totally," and "of course, though it's nothing compared to what The Voice did for Cee-Lo*.*" Still, even if we agree that side projects being treated with the same respect as "real" projects is a good thing, it doesn't mean the term as it was originally intended is necessarily bad. Take San Francisco's Window Twins, a collaboration between Tim Cohen of psych-rockers the Fresh & Onlys and Jon Bernson of the deconstructivist electro-pop group Exray's. Cohen and Bernson have recorded two albums together, including the new Wish, a collection of atmospheric sketches that explore the scuzzy, sinister, and lo-fi fringes of jazzy R&B, and ramshackle folk. It's not a fully realized record or especially immediate, and it's not really intended to be; Wish has the freeform adventurousness of an extemporaneous experiment, where the process is ultimately more important than the finished result. And, if appreciated in this context, it's a fascinating listen.
The album opening "Two Left Feet" is easily the most song-like track on Wish, sounding only slightly murkier than the Fresh & Onlys' excellent 2009 album Grey-Eyed Girls. But for the most part, Wish is more about trying out sonic textures than presenting polished compositions, establishing a mood that grows more unsettling as the album progresses. "The Sky is Back" is typical of Wish's smudged soulful malevolence, with its skittering beat and bright horn washes. On the glowering "Others", a cowpunk gallop clicks along like a clock, which is echoed by Cohen's menacing "tick tock" refrain. That paranoia of "Others"-- echoed by Cohen's insistence that "there's others in the world, don't forget about that/ you know there's others out there"-- deepens on the creepy "Good People", which pairs a despairing lyric ("when good people go away/ where do they go") with a spare, Massive Attack-like groove.
This is a far cry from the Fresh & Onlys' most recent album, the pretty and poppy Long Slow Dance. If Cohen was repressing his dark side on that record, he indulges it fully with Bernson, and in the process tries out weird sounds that no longer fit with the Fresh & Onlys' more streamlined presentation. About half of the time, the diversions don't coalesce, like on the woozy "Thunder and Lightning", which sways uneasily between promising abstraction and unfocused puttering. The bold "Wine Into Winter", with its minute-long drum solo and full-on jazz-rock affectations, is better, though mostly as a window into whatever Cohen and Bernson might do with their "other" groups. Wish works only intermittently on its own terms, but as a sketchbook for future the Fresh & Onlys and Exray's releases, it's potentially illuminating.
