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.
