Album Review: Green Twins, Nick Hakim

Having debuted his new album at Electric Picnic earlier this year, Hakim has shown that he’s drifted vocally from his original soul influences – Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and D’angelo – into new, previously unexplored territory.

‘Green Twins’, Nick’s first full-length LP, shows the musician exhibit breathy falsetto notes, through crackled, celestial sounding radio transmissions, while the album art – a tribute to Surrealism – leaves no guessing about the psychedelic and eclectic side of soul it emits.

On his 2014 EP Where Will We Go, Hakim dove into themes about how intoxication and isolation feed off each other, through his execution of some incredibly sultry numbers. In Green Twins, the marker is to show vignettes of relationship escapades. The singer pines for lost love and the nostalgia that comes with it, by juxtaposing mellow R&B beats with energetic, jovial guitar licks.

As the album progresses, Hakim’s vocals move from melancholic portamentos on the leaden ballad ‘Needy Bees,’ to sleazy whining on ‘Farmissplease’. Veering back to the most ethereal dimensions, however, is the album’s namesake track, ‘Green Twins’. Fuzzy and freaky, it seems to engender the feeling you’d have if you’ve been stranded in the desert for two weeks and just spotted a river stream mirage in the distance.

Regardless of the shift in mood and genre, ‘Green Twins’ is a therapeutic reverie. Nick Hakim proves he can put a modern spin on classic concepts. In many dissimilar ways.

8/10.