Twin Peaks with Fort Lean
Sunday, March 15
City Presbyterian | Oklahoma City
It’s a thin, thin line between good, sloppy fun and a total flaming shitshow, but Windy City product Twin Peaks make it look about as easy as Michael Jordan did winning six NBA championships. On stage, they are animated and maniacal, rolling through their ’60s weird-pop-seared take on garage punk with devious grins. They flail their arms, kick their legs and roll out their tongues like a cartoon coyote, but their spines are strong and upright, reinforced with some of the strongest modern rock ‘n’ roll songwriting you’ll hear in some dingy dive on a Wednesday night. They’re just barely of legal drinking age (one member still hasn’t hit the benchmark), but Twin Peaks have been doing this full-time for three years and sound like they’ve been at it that much longer.
Maybe the composed confidence they bring into the chaos is in thanks to the timeless influences (The Who, The Velvet Underground, The Beatles, Talking Heads) out of which the songwriting chops were formulated. It’s not that thousands bands haven’t attempted to channel similar names in the music they are making, but few seem as capable of seizing the most essential elements of that bygone, golden era and beating them around into a fiery creation of their own. Maybe rock ‘n’ roll needs saving. Maybe it doesn’t. But Twin Peaks seem as likely a savior as any if it should.
“We listen to a lot of old music. For me, it was my dad’s record collection, really,” guitarist and songwriter Clay Frankel said. “It comes off as something else, though. It’s not so intentional. We listen to a lot of that, and it bleeds through, but it’s got its own little spirit that is something different.”
Much like Black Lips, Ty Segall or Oklahoma favorite BRONCHO, it’s about marrying modern rebelliousness with tried-and-true technique. They happen to lend themselves to insanely fun live performances with the communal spirit of a house show — the natural result of being underage in a sprawling metropolis like Chicago.
“There’s a good DIY community that is very welcoming to anyone and anything. Being younger, even if we got a venue show, none of our friends could come. We were [performing] in peoples’ houses and basements, and that affected how we approached live shows,” Frankel explained. “Even if we are on a big stage or a music festival in the early afternoon, we like to try and act like you are witnessing a basement show.”
But that never means sacrificing the songs they are designed to serve. They have fun on stage but take pride in the amount of work and time they put into every single guitar chord and percussion fill.
“When we make records, one thing that’s not on our mind is how to perform it live; that comes later. We’re more interested in leaving behind really good records and to treat playing shows as something else entirely,” Frankel said. “It’s a sort of celebration. The recordings are there for you to hear how they were intended. We play shows to see how they actually live out there.”
