ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 15TH 2010


Twin Shadow’s debut Forget was produced by Grizzly Bear bassist Chris Taylor, and it’s a fact worth remembering. It appears one thing we can deduce in the year since Forget was released is that, despite its reliance on ‘that which has gone before’, it formed a solid blueprint thanks to its stylish grooves later found on Taylor’s solo project CANT and its recent release in the form of Dreams Come True. Forget was also the first record released through Taylor’s Terrible Records label (with a little help from 4AD), and subsequently formed the basis of a particular sound that Taylor has made something of an in-house signature. So for these reasons and its favourable associations with the CANT project, Forget has proven something of a benchmark by comparison.


How does it hold up by its own merits, though? With a new cut recently showcased in the form of Changes (warranting a somewhat moot response), Forget feels all the more precious than it did when it was released one year ago. The instinctive response when new releases sit a little left of the middle is to try and catagorise them to the nearest genre that we’re reminded of or, failing that, proceed to exclaim that it forms an interesting amalgamation of two or more of these genres. Forget was greeted with descriptions befitting ‘hazily new wave-tinged pop’ wallowing in ‘streaks of haunting synth textures’. For the most part this holds true, but after a year these songs feel like old friends, and any ‘haziness’ or ‘streaks’ are now bold and vibrant swathes of sonic candy which demonstrate not only Taylor’s masterful production and attention to detail, but George Lewis Jr.’s vocal dexterity bolstered by a diverse musical history pre-Twin Shadow.


Forget is a robust record concerned primarily with rhythm and groove and it’s important to keep this in mind whilst navigating its second half. Lewis is naturally gifted where melodic hooks are concerned and these songs feel rigorously laboured over to the point where any sharp edges are sanded to a smooth arc, buffed and polished to a finish devoid of any irregularities. They positively gleam with the falsities of a yuppie culture that Lewis mines from early 80s radio hits. This works both for and against the record. On one hand, hearing a song like I Can’t Wait for the first time can feel like a disengaging experience, but further inspection in context of the two songs that straddle it reveal it to be a natural progression in the bittersweet narrative of love lost, skirting the periphery of how to react to conflicted emotions, somewhere between anger and pathos. Those two songs, When We’re Dancing and Shooting Holes At The Moon, are more rhythmic than anything else here, transposing the streamline efficiency of I Can’t Wait’s encircling strings for strutting disco chic on the latter, the former more woozy-ballroom waltz for young lovers on prom night.


Tyrant Destroyed is a deceptive opening track and does little to determine a set path that Forget should logically mimic, opting instead for an almost chamber-pop aesthetic that works well in theory but would mark it as a decidely routine exercise, especially in the same year Beach House broke big with Teen Dream, an album that transpired to be perhaps the most accessible genre-crossing record of 2010. As Forget progresses, drum machines and overbearing synths slide into view, dominating the second half of the album on songs such as Yellow Balloon and the ominous Tether Beat. Castles In The Snow is taut with dramatic tension, opening with a piercing string section that marks a noticeably downcast turn in Lewis’ storytelling. It seems the nostalgia of these earlier songs - particularly the disco pastiche of At My Heels with its self-assured gyration - is not as wistful as that initial impression afforded.


It’s important to understand that Forget is not simply a revoking of an already well-worn 80s groove, nor is it a rehash of any particular trend. The unlikely 80s associations are unavoidable and there are many contemporary acts mining this sound now, from The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Yuck and the Smith Westerns, even down to the ostentation of Lady GaGa’s Highway Unicorn. Forget has many details which are invested in the past, it’s true, but it would be pointless to align these twelve groovy nuggets to any one particular decade. It succeeds if it manages to take the listener back to any point, whether that be to a position of childhood or perhaps even one year ago. That it can so readily place us in the here and now, observing it as something to go back to again and again through the sheer allure of nostalgia, is proof enough that the future of Twin Shadow is rife with potential.