ALBUM REVIEW: The Twang ‘N E O N T W A N G’

With a trippy, neo-psychedelic element embellishing the typical indie sound of N E O N T W A N G, I was keen to get my teeth into The Twang’s new album. The Twang’s thematic roots are in the indie, britpop and baggy scenes, and you can see where these essences have been honed on their new long player. Having worked with Youth – the music producer who recorded The Verve’s ‘Urban Hymns’, The Streets and B-Unique, although several amendments have been made to both band and sound, there is something undeniably British about The Twang which is exciting as after a decade of decline, British music is starting to get good again.

Almost like a Brummie Stone Roses, the album begins with a gentle but jaunty ‘bounce’ and continues this up until track 4, in which it becomes more of a “Wobble”. At this point, although still primarily indie-based, the psychedelia of ‘baggy revival’ origins become somewhat more prominent.

A sudden fade to static and we’re introduced to the, again, slightly different sound of ‘Sucker For The Sun’. The band slightly digresses here from comparative artists and allows us to explore its own sound before progressing into an optimistic jingle for ‘Almost Anything’. Of the few complaints that I could find on previous albums, it seemed that some wanted more variety, and N E O N T W A N G certainly delivers that.

A specific Twang twang is hard to pin down as the album is more like listening to a Genius Mix than a particular artist, but this makes each song novel and removes the repetitive qualities that I usually struggle to compliment in other contemporary music. There is, throughout, definitely a sense of music from times-gone-by, and that distinctive Northern British variant of indie music is ever strong in the band and the album, but N E O N T W A N G really does feel like an assortment of individual tracks compiled into an album as opposed to a themed or temporally-specific expression of the band’s current feelings towards music.

‘Bigger Than You’ became my favourite song on the album the first time I listened to it. Seeming to encapsulate and combine all previously mentioned aspects of the album – being primarily quite slow and soft, somewhat psychedelic, britpop-esque, distinctly Northern and a bit ‘bouncy’ – the song arguably defines what The Twang is, all in all, about.

‘Bigger Than You’ is, for me, the pinnacle of the album and in itself is a sufficient reason to go and buy it. Overall, N E O N T W A N G has a loosely defined list of genres to give it a sort-of gist, but mainly seems to explore all of the variants of sound that The Twang are able to produce over the course of the album. That’s not necessarily a criticism – there isn’t a ‘bad’ song on the album at all… it’s just… different. N E O N T W A N G is an interesting compilation and demonstration of The Twang’s musical prowess that I would definitely recommend listening to, even if just to experiment with the variants of British indie music that evidently now exist.

The album is due for release on the 10th March 2014 and can be found HERE