Lager or IPA. It’s the question of the summer but the answer is not quite as straightforward as you might think. Likewise, “Red Door Open”, the third studio album from The Twistettes. I’ve seen The Twistettes play and their two up tornado thing can make even grown up walls shake yet this album has more to it than being just another excuse to turn the volume up.
Certainly, those familiar with this band’s frenetic live antics will find much on this album to remind them what speeding up the main line feels like with the destination never seeming more than one power chord away from the next station and The Twistettes are clearly a band that can pummel your ears, and probably your mind, into submission through the simple expedient of having more motive power than most. However, they also do a nice line in pulling the inspiration for their lyrics from shared experiences and consequently weaponising it. Subtlety, on initial exposure at least, seems to have been mislaid yet, just like in matters of cuisine, this runaway train of an album proves to be more than its list of apparent ingredients as The Twistettes know how cook up a song and season it so that it seems sufficiently superficial to please the undemanding yet it actually has enough depth to turn the connoisseur into a repeat customer.
You don’t have to listen to the words to enjoy this album and I must confess that I did actually enjoy this album on that basis. Yes, I did play it at the kind of volume that would overwhelm a bombing raid yet even in those circumstances, even a charlatan such as I could easily determine that there were more reasons than that to put this album on repeat. And, in case you are interested, the answer is always lager.