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this review originally appeared in raccoon
climax golden twins | highly bred and sweetly tempered (on North East Indie)
This release from the Climax Golden Twins, largely composed of Southern Gothic acoustic pieces that would not be out of place soundtracking a David Gordon Green movie, seems worlds removed, at least intially, from the Twins' usual palette of ambience, screeches, and other mysterious sounds. But listening closely to the interstitial bits that link the more songlike pieces reveals an undercurrent of weirdness and menace, a continued expression of the Twins' interest in the link between audio technology and the unseen world. This link is not merely their own peculiar obsession: it's a cultural one, dating back to the spiritualist experiments of Edison and Watson, and remaining latent in the uncanny quality of recorded sound. So when you hear, over the course of this record, the drone-haloed voices of dozens of mysterious people—aged women, children, sinister men, summoned back from whatever archaic crackling Victrola-dimension they had gone to die in—the experience feels pronouncedly uneasy, as though the Twins have hijacked your stereo for some cryptic seance-purpose. This disc is a must for anyone interested in what Wire journalist Erik Davis calls the "electromagnetic imaginary."
Happy Halloween.
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