Music
FIXED
Released: December 9th, 2006
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Fortune Is On
Released 2003
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Review
by Joe Sample
Published in Focus magazine
There's a sigh that runs through this musc, and a sigh can hold many things; hope, nostalgisa, loss, relief, regret and resignation. All of these come through in Twilighters music. The Chapel Hill quarted fashions music from the traditional guitar (Brandon Herndon, bass (Josh Sokal), and drums (Kaeri Johnson), and adds Sonar Strange's Keys as well as organ, moog, shakers and cello.
The opener, If the Spirit Doesn't Move sets the tone: life going by, time, the world ("Nowhere, nowhere/in between here and there/something leaves"). Build a House, with its cello and off beat piano is hazy dreaming and late night hope ("I miss what we used to be/Let's sneak up on ourselves"). Coolies takes its time getting to the chorus where "It's just a sigh when you're alone/when you feel you are dying/All we are/It's just... that's the way/All we are/It's just... fell ok." A second distorted, guitar comes in near the end, the drums and bass kick up a notch, and everything gains momentum, reaches for the sky, then falls back in on itself. Though it's not explicit in the lyrics, Ride Shotgun, with its programmed beats and eerie tones, conveys something cracked and dangerous lurking just outside the headlights' reachor inside the narrator's own head.
The rhythm section plays it laid back and spare. The guitar can move from soul-pop strum to dropping scattered notes that shine like coins in a fountain. The keys and other instruments come all moody and narcotic. There's a fragility, especially in Herndon's vocals, that give you the feeling the music was here all along -- they caught it in cupped hands, knowing it could fall and shatter at any moment. They've been compared to the Velvet Underground in some of the latter band's more pared down (read: non-wall-of-sound) stuff. This is music for a low lit, three a.m. morning with half a beer and no girl beside you when you know there could have been, and it's ok because life comes back around.
Lest you think this is all down tempo and laconic, there's the quick shuffle and soulful testfying of Somebody Got Born and the African rhythms and tin can vocals of Hustler. Radar has a loping bass line, drums that roll and tumble over themselves droning synth tones. 45 Xenons of the Almighty is straighe, poppy, rave up where they get to the point of it all: "Coming down like a dream/Coming down over me/Coming down like a dream."
from The Independent
Police Chief Brody's dreams are a fevered hum of dorsal fins and choppy swells. Amity island's ringed in dark vibrant storm clouds but it will not rain. Adrift on his sunfish, Brody feels like a character in Eliot's "Wasteland" Twilighter chums the sea, skirting and circling pop melodies tauntingly ever moving its jagged guitar taking chunks out of the rhythmic pulse. Dark and winding, its melodies pulsing like undertow, Twilighter never gives up the hunt.