March 10, 2000

Magenta

They're only teenagers, after all. Give them time. It's just a phase.

6 / 10 They act their age, do Twist, and the music they make reflects this. Being teenagers, they do punky, snotty, difficult, they even do self-destructive. But also, being teenagers, they're pretty complicated. So they thrash around on 'Lay Low', a speedway smash-up of guitars and hurtling, whining melodies; but they also find, on 'Glistening', a mood of almost grown-up grandeur.

/img/Twist0300.jpg Granted, singer Emma Fox still sneers and bawls, but there's a deliberately complex pattern to drummer Leanne's rhythms, a cool and crafted surge to the epic coda, which suggests Twist might just stretch beyond the usual pigeon-Hole-ing. 'Glistening' is a new number, though, and there are only two more of those, the rest of this mini-album being made up of their previous three singles. And those singles carry the burden of comparison to Courtney and co way too heavily. Emma sounds a lot like Ms Love, rarely bringing her dead Birmingham intonations to the fore, which means tracks like the 'Live Through This' drone-strum 'Good Is Girl' lose even more personality.

But there's enough twisted Shangri-Las ramalama here, enough raw riffing and lyrical bile, to suggest that Twist can become their own band. They're only teenagers, after all. Give them time. It's just a phase.