Twisted Teens Blame the Clown LP
There’s something about New Orleans that defines its own weirdness, a disparate collage of Cajun, creole, country, and punk subcultures with an identity distinctly of and desperately not of the American south. This transient collection can create art and music that is hard to pin down and classify it as anything other than itself, and TWISTED TEENS could only authentically come from there. A melting pot of garage rock, folk punk, blues, soul, and Americana, they have shaped their own sound that just feels like something familiar in that way that you could know WOODIE GUTHRIE by listening to the CLASH. There’s a crazy mishmash of GUN CLUB experimentation, zydeco energy, and TOM WAITS weirdness. Lead singer and guitarist Caspian Hollywell’s scratched-out, cigarettes-and-whisky-soaked voice harkens to his folk punk roots in SCISSORBILLS and BLACKBIRD RAUM—I mean, he’s wearing a SCROUNGER shirt on the cover of the album, so you get an idea where this is rooted. Lyrically, the songs have the humor and narrative weirdness of Tom Robbins on a meth bender. Hollywell is backed by Ramon (RJ) Santos on pedal steel, and their live shows incorporate a random entourage of other musicians on stage. It’s Santos’s playing that is the guts of the band, twisting and intertwining with the guitar and vocals and then breaking away while still carrying the song.
