Oh GOD, this is so motherfucking pleasant.
I haven’t felt this level of moderate tonal arousal and well-supervised, tempered musical excitement since I first heard The Bluetones. And I’ll wager that The Twang, if they work hard, could be another Bluetones. Like them, they suffer from musical pleasantness. With their blokey Birmingham accents, rough choral harmonies (a genuinely nice touch), generically picked guitars, Reni-drum parts, unobtrusive loops and subtle piano motifs, all wrapped around easily sung football terrace melodies, I would have no qualms whatsoever about having these young gents do my garden or perform errands about the house.
As the album progresses there are hints of something more interesting. ‘Williamsburg’ threatens to become genuinely engaging as its guitar picking, dual-vocaled, string-swamped energy builds like a suburban Morricone. And the piano-based ‘Another Bus’ has a plaintive anguish that’s only spoiled by a guitar part that’s too obviously cadged from The Edge’s cast-offs. Even the opening track, the piano and shaker pounding ‘Took The Fun’, suggests a more interesting album than the one that follows. Actually, the problem here seems to be the more obviously guitar-based the track, the more generic The Twang (sorry Mr. Guitarist), but there you have it. Perhaps they should become more piano-based and call themselves The Plink?