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Brian and Michael D’Addario – the Twigs brothers – released their third album Songs For The General Public as lockdown clamped its jaws shut. It’s a brilliant mix that gets that 70s sound so spot-on that it’s a wonder tracks haven’t turned up on the Walkman of yer man in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Still, given the extra time the brothers suddenly had on their hands, they decided to change tack. “We started making records we would listen to ourselves,” said younger D’Addario Michael.
A new approach found resplendent form in the power-pop pulchritude of the appropriately titled Everything Harmony and A Dream Is All We Know. If there’s any doubt about their streak continuing with Look For Your Mind!, it should be noted that they’ve left recent single I’ve Got A Broken Heart and its perfect key change off the album because they have great songs falling out of their collective pocket
Everything here would qualify for another mighty seven-inch, and the records that the band surely do listen to themselves are all evident. Hearing the harmonies and jangle of the title track is akin to discovering a lost Byrds master tape; 2 Or 3 has you checking the credits for the name Brian Wilson, while the ballad Mean To Me must be the result of a tune-writing séance with the late Beach Boy; Nothin’ But You has the words ‘Big’ and ‘Star’ written all over it.
On hearing the single I Just Can’t Get Over Losing You – a bordering-on-the-divine slice of 60s pop that you might expect to hear soundtracking an old clip from The Ed Sullivan Show – it might be easy to think that what The Lemon Twigs do is merely pastiche.
But the songwriting and attention to production detail behind something like Joy, a delicate beauty with woodwinds and strings, that the young Paul Simon would have considered a good day’s work, or the George Harrison-versus-the Wilson-Brothers-down-the-Cavern strains of Bring You Down prove that the Twigs are far more than just prosaic copyists. They even, apparently, had their dad read some words from the great literary figure WB Yeats over the album’s closing track Your True Enemy, although naturally they reversed the tape, just because they can.
If you’re partial to the glittering seam of music that runs from The Beatles through Badfinger, Alex Chilton, Todd Rundgren, Cheap Trick, Jellyfish and a thousand others, then you’re going to love this album.
