TWIN TIGERS Gray Waves (Old Flame)

I’ll make matters clear before I proceed: I’ve never really been much of a fan of indie music’s so called lo-fi chic, which to me just sounds like an excuse for bad production and awful mixing. Granted, I’m no audiophile, but the blood in me just boils when I hear a record like Athenian four-piece Twin Tigers’ full length debut album, Gray Waves. Because there’s no two ways around it: the record sounds awful.

That’s not to say the band itself is bad: their deep-fried, dirty shoegaze brand of garage rock is relentlessly catchy at times with pop hooks and melodies that will perk up your ears. But there’s only so much the human ear can take of mindless distortion and flat-sounding reverb before you switch off the record, which is exactly what I ended up doing. It’s a crying shame because songs like Red Fox Run, which features a mildly interesting guitar riff, sound like they’d be immensely catchy if the melody and lyrics weren’t so frustratingly indecipherable. Some songs, like the previously released Sexless Love, sound interesting enough to almost keep you listening on, but then you hit a dry patch like the effortless boring and tuneless Feathers, and what spark of patience the good songs had ignited is mercilessly extinguished. By the time you reach the ending songs of Crystal Highway (which features an excruciatingly painful, distorted vocal track) and Island, you’ll be wishing you had a physical copy of the album just so you could fling it across the room and imagine you were aiming it at the sound engineer. “Take that, and let’s see if you ever dare to radio-distort another vocal again!”

I can’t say this is a completely objective review—I already excused myself from all such pretensions in the first line anyway. It’s just an awful pity because from their live performances on YouTube, they seemed like such a promising proposition. Let’s just chalk one up to debut LP studio inexperience, and keep our fingers crossed that the next record won’t sound like it was recorded in a toilet.