Album Review: Twinesuns – The Leaving

Being true to themselves is clearly of the utmost importance to a band like doom drone specialists Twinesuns. Check the first paragraph of their biography and you’ll find the following line screaming at you – “We wanted to break free from all these rules that dominate heavy music today”. It follows then that if you spin their record, The Leaving, you’ll notice a lack of drums or vocals, the structural irregularities in their songwriting, the lingering repetition and the error-strewn nature of their live eight-hour recording. Simply put, they are unafraid to scramble our noggins a little.

And scramble them they do. You’ll feel the insane levels of distortion and earth-shattering vibrations bursting from  “Thor” Ohne’s powered-up bass cabs impacting as a series of punches to the gut. Whilst C.’s baritone Telecaster and mournful E-bow do battle with wild feedback that will set your teeth on edge, you’ll hear a range of bleak effects, loops and tones that will have you on your knees, crushing invisible oranges in Twinesuns’ vast, post-apocalyptic wasteland. If you survive all that, there’s always guest moog-meister, Renzo, to finish you off.

No matter how original they may consider themselves they still follow the basics of the genre. They give it plenty of run-time to allow for their spine-tinglingly torpid pacing and throw in a mass of cyclical patterns to brand the riffs onto the listener’s memory banks. In fact, it is their slavish dependency upon these basics that ultimately mark them out as a less palatable alternative to their droning brethren.

With only five tracks to sift through, there is a surprisingly distinct lack of variety and ingenuity. Sporting naggingly over-simplified structures, the songwriting has a tendency to merely resort back to the same dominating and domineering gruntwork put in by the drop strings. The last two tracks, and in particular, the anomalous and uninspired 3-note repeater “Like My Father Before Me…”, play like two ends of the same infinity-bothering jam. On the plus side, the closer “Die Drie Gesichter Der Furcht” spreads its wings a little wider adding a new level of melancholic resonance with an earthy, throbbing pulse and an echoing, ethereal sawing that could only come from somewhere deep underground.

Certainly, the DIY spirit is kept alive here and fans of Sunn 0))), Earth, Sleep, Khanate, Eagle Twin and GYBE! should find some crumbs of comfort in their raw authenticity, robust core and grasp of the powerful concept that less is, so often, more.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2014/06/twinesuns-the-leaving-hummus-records/