While not exactly a concept album, The Holy Cross Tigers is, as one frantic rocker puts it, “Armed With a Vision.” Fittingly, for someone who’s no stranger to living off the grid, Hollywell frequently looks to nature for guidance, taking comfort in the resiliency of the flora around him and the knowledge that “when a tree is split in two,” it’s ultimately “leaving room for something new.” On the sad-eyed power-pop salvo “Stalks,” he warns us that he’s “about to taste the dark side of the moon/And wallow in bloody business,” but he cedes to the meditative properties of the surrounding yarrow in full bloom. Toward the end of the record, he’s practically dishing out botany lessons as motivational advice: “Seeds do not flourish in the sunshine/Overturn and cover it up with dark,” he assures us atop the carnivalesque stomper “Every Flower,” before driving that darkest-before-the-dawn sentiment home with the communal campfire singalong “Darker the Night Is the Brighter I See.”
In between those two complementary tracks, we’re treated to a brief electro experiment that houses a spoken-word lecture from veteran bluegrass artist Alice Gerrard about Kundalini philosophy—a glimpse of both the avant-garde instincts and spiritual yearning tucked behind Twisted Teens’ old-time rock’n’roll veneer. With each new Twisted Teens record, it feels like those weird glitches in their musical matrix are becoming more feature than bug, and more regularly seeping into the songs proper: In its home stretch, the adrenalized twang-punk of “Blue Rose” is subjected to a murky dub remix in real time, a sudden mutation that enters its next evolutionary stage on the instrumental sister track “Blue Flower,” where Twisted Teens are momentarily reborn as beatmakers for goth breakdancers.
In moments like these, Twisted Teens records sound less like the work of a live, in-the-raw rock band than a mixtape collage of one, with subliminal intrusions that sound like they didn’t fully wipe an old tape before hitting record on the new songs. Speaking to the How Long Gone podcast recently, Hollywell summed up Twisted Teens’ formative philosophy: “The real hard thing is not to compose the rock opera. The real hard thing is to compose ‘Love Me Do’ again.” With The Holy Cross Tigers, he once again rises to the challenge of writing a bunch of infectious, easygoing tunes about surviving the hard times, but he also leaves you with the sense this band is secretly itching to make its “Revolution 9.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
