by Anna Solomon (@chateau.fiasco)
It feels stupidly cliché to say that a band called Twine sounds “rough,” “frayed,” or “wound-up,” but the most defining quality of the Australian quintet’s full-length debut New Old Horse is how tense and abrasive it is. With such horse imagery and the emphasis on shrill fiddle in addition to guitars, “Countrygaze,” might seem like a fitting buzzword. And sure, a comparison with Wednesday is apt to describe the all-encompassing walls of noise, but aside from the light shuffle in the drums on “Sleeping Dogs” or “Between States,” the songwriting takes very little from the sounds of the American south, and even that feels a stretch.
The guitar textures are pure post-hardcore, moving between plucked arpeggios, clanging chords, and raw noise. The fiddle tends to be a slow-moving texture, swelling over the walls of guitar and rarely taking the spotlight. That’s not to say that it isn’t essential to the sound of the album, though. It can match the aggression of the noisy guitars when necessary, but it often serves as the most melodic piece of the arrangement. “Fruit to Ripe” is a great example of where the violin shines as the featured melody over aggressive punk, but even it spends almost as much time shrieking along with the guitars and increasingly deranged recitations of “one two three one two three one two three!”
This passage is one of the most memorable pieces of an album where hooks aren’t generally the emphasis, but it’s far from the only point that sticks. There’s “Spine,” which despite introducing itself as a droning and doomy piece, ends up as a relatively lighter track. The falling harmonies in the guitar and violin which fill out the verse in a way that’s uncharacteristically melodic for Twine, and the driving alt-rock chorus brings the intensity back without losing accessibility.
Moments of accessibility are few and far between on New Old Horse. Opener “Future Exhales” makes this clear from the jump with it’s exasperated vocal performance and abrupt feel changes. Even the more downtempo tracks are tense and twisted up. There’s a subtle back and forth flip in the drums on the verses of “My God,” keeping the midtempo track from feeling too steady. It’s punctuated with shortened bars and abrupt dynamic shifts all throughout.
Near end of the project, “Between States” and the penultimate title track which follows it take more traditional and gradual approaches to their progression, allowing the band to breathe just enough to carry them through the rest of the album. Closer “High Tide Loose Change” brings back the throbbing terror stronger than ever though, with its slowly slammed cluster chords and a vocal performance mostly consisting of desperate cries. It's more unconventionally structured too, stretching all the way out to seven minutes. After an eerily quiet passage, the band brings the intensity back with less dissonance. The guitars are still abrasive, but the violin is nothing short of beautiful, and it pays off the tension that Twine has been building more-or-less nonstop for the entire project.
Twine are sonically at their breaking point for the entire runtime of their impressive debut. The hardest hits are delayed, the builds are slow, and the tension is always high. To listen to New Old Horse is to be slingshotted around for 47 minutes straight, sometimes violently quick, other times dramatically slow.