Twin Peaks did a beautiful, sensible thing with Sunken. They made it short.
An album this thick with guitar effects, an album so persistently fuzzed-out and reverb-soaked that it hardly ever offers a quiet moment and needs to keep the run-time down. With just under 20 minutes of music, Twin Peaks do all of this quite well. It’s all they need to make their case.
“Out of Commission” might do that job best in just one minute and 25 seconds of relentless drum-thrashing, shouting and a short but sweet guitar solo. The young quartet did a nice job of pulling little guitar moments up and out of the haze all over Sunken. “Baby Blue” and “Ocean Blue,” the record’s bookends, put that trick to particularly good use amongst some of the record’s more spacey arrangements.
But this isn’t the kind of lo-fi stuff that’s more fun than it is objectively good. It is a lot of fun — a good record for a youthfully carefree summer — but underneath, it’s written with an ear for a good melody. Twin Peaks is wailing like a garage band to sounds that could translate to something cleaner and more pop. Inevitable comparison: Smith Westerns. Twin Peaks’ fellow Chicago band started out young, too, and the new guys share the same promise for good things to come.
Some of the lyrics are goofy, but Cadien Lake James delivers every line so earnestly, even through the vocal effects, that it’s hard not to like. Sunken is hard not to like, and you’ll want more.
![“Tetris” is a video game that’s simple and, in its way, quite beautiful. People around the world know this, as the Russian puzzler requiring the increasingly quick arrangement of differently shaped four-block pieces that fall from the top of the screen has sold millions and millions of copies over a few decades. The new film […]](https://www.coloradodaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/TNH-L-FilmReview-Tetris-WBOX-033123-01.jpg?w=525 "“Tetris” is a video game that’s simple and, in its way, quite beautiful. People around the world know this, as the Russian puzzler requiring the increasingly quick arrangement of differently shaped four-block pieces that fall from the top of the screen has sold millions and millions of copies over a few decades. The new film […]")