To draw parallels to another recent work of art about a passionate but doomed gay romance as seen through the eyes of a precocious teenager, it would be as if all the gorgeous, tone-setting B-roll footage of the Northern Italian landscape in Call Me by Your Name was replaced with shots of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The album’s two most robust rockers, “Bodys” and “Cute Thing,” now sound like the upbeat radio singles they always should have been, the latter adding a couple of stomping, glammy guitar solos for good measure.īut it still feels like an important element is missing. “Beach Life-in-Death,” a 12-minute multi-part epic and the album’s centerpiece, benefits from greater clarity of production, putting into focus how meticulously each section builds and flows into the next. And undoubtedly, the extra muscle works in favor of many songs. For some who may have had trouble finding an entry point to the songs through the original album’s lo-fi haze, this will be good news. With its tight and at times almost arena-sized arrangements and clean-though not slick-production, the new version of the album, subtitled Face to Face, jettisons that entire aspect of the Twin Fantasy experience. And on an emotional one too: Every time Toledo excitedly rushes the beat, or when his voice cracks on a climactic note-especially the way he delivers the line “I don’t want to go insane” on “Beach Life-in-Death”-it’s a reminder that this kid isn’t just singing about this experience, he’s living it. What that means is that even in the places where the songs themselves drag or settle on a dull riff, the original Twin Fantasy still entrances on an atmospheric level. Its sound quality acts like fog hanging over the proceedings, approximating the hormone-addled mental state of adolescence. Cloaked in hissing lo-fi distortion and reverb, the original production is sonically and compositionally evocative. While Toledo claims that he always intended to go back and “finish” Twin Fantasy, that very idea is anathema to what made the album so compelling in the first place. Three years after signing with Matador Records, Toledo has re-recorded the album with the aid of his seven-piece band, in effect rectifying the ramshackle musicianship and GarageBand fidelity of his original self-recorded version. “Bodys” proves an early crowd-pleaser, while an epic rendition of “Beach Life-In-Death” and the beautiful “Sober To Death” bring the night to a close.Ĭar Seat Headrest might be looking back, but it is going forward – fast.Thanks to its preternaturally complex song structures and close-to-the-bone recounting of sexual awakening, Twin Fantasy has built a devoted following since Will Toledo posted it on Bandcamp in 2011 at the age of 19.
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While this might have left some fans worrying they were going to hear Bob Dylan-style rearrangements of all Toledo’s hits, they were soon reassured by “Destroyed By Hippie Powers”, which saw the band’s two drummers (yes, you read that right) joined by a third, who was pulled from the crowd and encouraged to hit anything in sight.ĭespite their retrospective nature, the songs from Twin Fantasy sound as fresh live as they did when Toledo first recorded them on a cheap laptop. The memorable opening riff to “Fill In The Blank” is ditched, with the song almost unrecognisable until the vocals kick in. Much as it has re-imagined Twin Fantasy, the band is also unafraid to play around with its other material.
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A prolific songwriter who famously self-released 11 records online before being signed, the original album was written in 2011 when Toledo was 19 and has now been been re-recorded and re-imagined following the band’s commercial success.