Artist: Twin Tribes
Title: Altars
Genre: Darkwave / Coldwave
Release Date: 9th April 2021
Label: Negative Gain / Manic Depression / Young & Cold Records
Album Review
Maybe I’m just grumpy. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps I’m missing the point and all these remixes and re-releases and repackaged products and stuff are all really brilliant ideas and creative muscle-flexing, and not cynical cash-ins, artistic deserts and a desperate squeezing of the fan’s patience and purse-strings. Perhaps if I wasn’t so grumpy, I’d see that. Yes, that must be it.
And that’s why, back in the day, a fairly famous writer called Mr Shakespeare wrote a stack of fairly decent plays but felt an itch beneath his quill. So, he went up to a bunch of his mates and he said thus - “forsooth, I am unhappy with my masterpieces, perhaps you could do me the kindness of writing my work again, but in your own style. Perhaps, good folk, you could write each masterpiece in the way YOU would have written them, if you were me.” But he didn’t, did he? Otherwise, we’d have 15 versions of ‘Macbeth’, ending with a Drum ‘n Bass rendition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’.
And then there’s good old Pablo Picasso. He’s in his famous Blue Period, but he’s just not quite feeling it’s doing it for him. So, he shuffles over to his fellow artistic types and they oblige him and paint shit-loads of yellow, and red, and pink, all over his Blue Period stuff, and suddenly he’s got a whole new portfolio of art he didn’t have yesterday. Genius!
I’m labouring the point, but then it gets tiresome ploughing this lonely furrow. What we have here is a perfectly decent enough Coldwave band - TWIN TRIBES - who write perfectly decent enough songs about death and the occult and parallel universes and suchlike, and make videos that are gloomy and arty and gothy, deciding to release a remix album, and not even try the usual ploy of chucking in a couple of new songs as a breadcrumb trail. Do people really wake up and think, with great excitement, “today is the day of the long-awaited new REMIX album by a band I love”? Do they? Really?
There’s nothing wrong with all these spirited versions of TWIN TRIBES songs, and there’s a good roll-call of respectable artists and bands doing the remixing (I especially like, for example, how ASH CODE really do make everything they touch sound like, well, ASH CODE) but as long as we let bands think they can get away with foisting this kind of stuff on us, then they will. I’m absolutely not one to hark back to ‘the good old’ days - it’s a complete myth that things were better or more fair or authentic once upon a time - but at least a remix was something shoved on the end of a single to pad it out a bit, and not something held up to the light like a shiny new diamond.
Buy Shakespeare. Buy Picasso. Even buy TWIN TRIBES. But all these pissing around the edges things… avoid.
Tracklist
01. The River (Skeleton Hands remix)
02. Tower Of Glass (Geometric Vision remix)
03. Dark Crystal (Luz Futuro remix)
04. Fantasmas (Ash Code remix)
05. Perdidos (Cult Of Alia remix)
06. Upir (NITE remix)
07. Exilio (Wingtips remix)
08. Shadows (Matte Blvck remix)
09. Still In Still (Dave Parley remix)
10. Portal To The Void (She Past Away remix)
11. Avalon (Bootblacks remix)
12. Talisman (Creux Lies remix)
Line-up
Luis Navarro
Joel Nino Jr
Website
https://www.facebook.com/TwinTribes / https://twintribes.bandcamp.com/
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 3
Sound: 3
Total: 3 / 10
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