Twin Shadow

Twin Shadow was always Del's shit. I never really paid much attention because Del seemed to have it covered and it always verged on the cusp of what I could listen to on repeat. I can admit now that I just wasn't ready for it.

I'm the guy who wants music that could potentially get him obsessed. I want music to make me feel like the people making the music made it just for me. I want something that even when I'm not listening to it I'm imagining myself listening to it.

I want the music I fucking adore to be with me even when it's not.

The new Twin Shadow album is turning out to be one of those albums.

My first holy shit moment with Eclipse actually happened when I wasn't able to listen to the album because I was sitting in a three hour meeting. Twin Shadow somehow informed me that I was going to fucking love the ever loving shit out of this album and there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do about it. All I could do was stare at the album cover.

Look at that shit again.

If that album cover isn't perfect, then you're afraid to look yourself in the eye while masturbating ain't you? That album cover is telling in that it's stylish sure, but more importantly it's fucking confident as fuck. Twin Shadow is the dude that makes a fringed leather jacket look fucking masterfully masculine in 2015, like a Hall or an Oates or my uncle Bob made the porn stache a few decades back. I'm not just impressed with how fucking dope the image is, I'm impressed that it means so fucking much to me and it's just a black and white picture of dude in a pop-motherfuckin-pose brose.

Eclipse, musically, is on par to be my favorite pop album of 2015, but it almost feels closer to Sade's Lovers Rock than Taylor Swift's 1989. While it feels danceable in some areas, it's fucking insanely personal and might be appreciated more alone on an introspective level than in the cluurrrb. And even then, there are moments all over this fucker that DEMAND you point them out to the casual music fan and INSIST that they become as obsessed as you are, or face the reality of living in WORLD AS A SHEEP BRO.

Seriously, the love I have for just the title track Eclipse alone is frightening. At the 2:28 mark and then onward, I'm fucking covered in pop music pimples as the rasp on this dude's voice is so fucking impassioned I can do nothing by clench my fists and yank forward on my pleather members only jacket's collar as I walk adamantly through a foggy mist blowing up out of a sewer grate as the night turns everything a 1980's black and white.

Twin Shadow takes his pop music and injects it with this breed of theatricality that would sound corny balls on anyone else, and by smothering nearly every song in this beautifully original orchestration, I'd wager any song on Eclipse could earn itself a favorite of mine depending on what color spandex I'm wearing under my previously mentioned members only jacket. From the strings and the backing vocals and the shimmering guitar on When The Lights Turn Out, the percussion on To The Top that can only be the sound of mallets made of bones striking cauldrons dressed in the skin of whatever human or creature whose bones made the mallets pulled tight over boiling entrails, to the simplicity of the piano licks on Alone and Turn Me Up, and on to energizingly powerful chorus of I'm Ready, and the OOOOOooooOOOOOO's on Old Love/New Love, Twin Shadow fucking MURDERS this album.

If you have a void in your soul from not having any music that can both elicit shoulder shimmies AND the need to wipe tears, I would like you to take this Twin Shadow album and strip naked and dance when you feel the need to dance and look out into the distance when you feel the need to look out into the distance, but more importantly I'd like you enjoy being naked.

Because you're beautiful bro.