When I inevitably start my five guitar post-hardcore fugazi-noodling post-rock band, it will be my goal to play a support slot for Twin Towns. More post-punk than post-hardcore though, Twin Towns make the soundtrack to the trials and tribulations of city rail.
Dirty yet conversational, their music has that musty smell of engine soot and stale chewing gum, and zoning out to their latest single Thuggish, the imagery of the dregs of this poor city’s broken society sitting on those blue Tangara seats won’t leave my head.
Sydney isn’t a nice place to be after dark. The lads on George St, the vomiting teens on Oxford St, the muscular women roaming King St – Twin Towns get it.
Watching the video and listening to the lyrics (which is probably what I should have done first) – it’s equally, if not moreso, about the neon clad soldiers whose job it is to patrol these dusty grey city streets. It’s a pretty brutal look at nights on Sydney’s streets, with some brilliant poetic imagery that sounds somewhere between spoken word and a droning baritone.
There’s half a tonne of Goulburn’s finest, kneeling on his back brings to the fore memories of that guy who got absolutely dicked on by the coppers that one time, or that lad at central station who was getting his bum bag privacy violated while pushed up against the wall. You weren’t sure what he did wrong, but it seemed pretty funny at the time. Think beyond that drunken schadenfreude and you get the message that Thuggish is trying to convey.
Shot in Sydney’s inner suburbs on an upside-down VHS recorder, the natural grain of the recording serve to highlight the dark radioheadish themes of the song. Uncomfortable and dizzying, the video instills a shockingly accurate feeling of wandering home after a night of heavy drinking and not having much fun doing so.
Download Thuggish for free from Twin Towns’ bandcamp at the link below.
