Review: Twisted Teens - Florida Water Blues
Aidan Greenlee
Twisted Teens came onto my radar after their breakout album Blame the Clown, their second full length LP and their first of three planned releases this year. The duo has a unique style that mixes punk, country, Cajun and just about anything else they can sling past you. With a tracklist that's mostly recorded off the cuff or in a single take, their latest album, Florida Water Blues, is surprisingly polished.
On songs like Top Of The World Hwy No. 2, Caspian Hollywell's vocal delivery has an Elvis Costello lilt, on others they sound more akin to Viagra Boys (Concealed Weepin', Swamp). Either way, he's got a rasp that couldn't be more fitting for a song titled Hand Me A Cigarette, where he croons about living life as it comes. It's tracks like this where they effuse the punk ethos. Both Caspian and RJ "Razor" Ramon came up in the New Orleans music scene "bumming around", living for their art. The title track paints a picture of this lifestyle with lines like "You've had about a hundred beers of solitude" or "Well, a flask of rubbing alcohol makes a riot on the tongue". They truly are singing the blues.
The whole album is layered with rockabilly guitar, pocketed drum machine hits, and RJ's sweet, sweet steel guitar. Most of the time the steel guitar is used as backing texture, adding country twang to the garage-punk, but RJ breaks out a solo for the outro of Riding, a song about riding through life's hardship. In fact, it's the steel guitar that makes this album stand out from Twisted Teens's other records. Here it's much more prominent, which makes the whole album sound more cowboy. Javelina is probably the most country song on the record, completely dropping the distorted guitars and going acoustic. It's a song about pointless hunting, or perhaps an allegory for lost love.
This record is also more varied in tone than Blame the Clown, demonstrating hard-hitting rock on Guided Thunder, soothing ballads on Sun Go Down, and everything in between. This is exactly the type of punk I'll continue to come back to and I can't wait to see what they have in store on their next album.
Favorite Tracks:
- Hand Me A Cigarette
- Swamp
- Guided Thunder
- Florida Water Blues
- Business
- Javelina