Slim Twig - Thank You For Stickin' With Twig

Thank You For Stickin’ With Twig is the latest long-playing album from the artist known to the world (or at least to his mother) as Slim Twig. Coming out August 7, 2015 on DFA, you may be surprised to know that it represents the fifth album by the Toronto based songwriter / producer. Twig has released these previous records among a swath of EP’s, singles and one-offs, displaying in the process a complete disregard for genre or consistency. The evolution from Contempt!, his sample-stained 2009 debut, through to A Hound At The Hem, his symphonic tribute album to Nabokov’s Lolita (reissued by DFA in 2014), is not entirely linear, although intriguing all the same. Like so many surf-smoothed stones lining the beach shore, briefly unburied only to be discarded once deemed un-skippable, so Twig has gone about seeking the proper rock to cast at just the right angle. One can see why he extends a gratuity to those listeners who've stuck around.

In what form then, do we now find the twenty-six-year old, self-proclaimed ‘wah wah master’? After producing two albums for U.S. Girls (U.S. Girls on Kraak in 2011, Gem in 2012), and scoring two films (Sight Unseen & We Come As Friends), Twig found himself in 2013 at a creative impasse re: his own songwriting. He had been through full band incarnations live and on record, featuring a cast of Toronto heavies. He briefly performed Slim Twig sets as a duo with Meg Remy (U.S. Girls), combining versions of Twig’s released songs with freely structured improvisations, samples, and brightly melodic, synth textures. Something in this combination of the pop-minded and the cerebrally-produced has rubbed off on the recordings found on Twig’s latest.

Thank You For Stickin’ With Twig is to date the most sonically immersive album in Twig’s discography. Where some records have focused explicitly on sample-based songwriting, while others have been completely live-recorded, the new album arrives at a perfectly produced fusion of fidelities. It hovers, glamorously caught between a cloud of obscurant, half-speed tape hiss, and the most stoned Jeff Lynne production you’ve ever heard. Twig flirts here with a variety of vibes, most often opting for a three dimensional approach whereby a warped tape aura is overlaid with colourful, laser-cut keyboard and guitar melodies. A fetishization of analogue texture is married to a digital approach. All the while, we find Twig irreverently raiding classic rock of its symbolism, sexuality, and social ambition for ulterior subversions. In this respect, TYFSWT’s closest cousin may be Royal Trux’s Accelerator.

Opening cut, ‘Slippin Slidin’, establishes itself as a cock rock analogue to Kanye West’s ‘On Sight’. We are welcomed by a blast of synth noise, soon followed by sexually agitated lyrics (supported by Meg Remy, whose vocals are featured prominently on much of the record) atop a deafening beat, distorted and sleazy. The immensity of the production represents an evolution of Twig’s approach, sustained at a fever pitch throughout the album.

The centrepiece of the album is composed of two songs sharing the middle of the running time. ‘Roll Red Roll (Song For Steubenville)’ eulogizes the tragedy of the young girl who was the tabloid subject of group sexual abuse. Its opening is harshly interrupted by a mass of pitch-shifted martial drums and wildly panned, distorted fuzz lines, composing a sonic poem through sound and oblique lyrics. Side B opens with ‘Fog Of Sex (N.S.I.S)’, a cinematic fusion of plastic soul and flute score-for-horror-film. With voicings from both Twig and Remy, the song makes overt the album’s subliminal motive.

The album closes with a cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s instrumental ‘Cannabis’. Slim Twig’s latest modulation of voice is to re-contextualize an era of ambition in produced rock music, dislodging the hackneyed and clichéd in the process. Sonically and politically, his aim is to be a rock n’ roll subversive. Context is everything, and Twig’s gift may be in zeroing in on that. He collages his sounds together in a continuum where pop criticism is always recycling through what it chooses to lend cultural currency, if only for an instant. As of now, he’s sized up rock n’ roll, and determined it seems as good as any other vessel to commandeer for his creative impulse. Power to him.