Twin Sister - Colour Your Life

Twin Sister
Color Your Life

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Brooklyn’s Twin Sister garnered considerable buzz Stateside on the strength of their debut EP Vampires With Dreaming Kids – which they thoughtfully made freely available through their website. Although their second LP delivers some radiantly chromatic moments – assuring them their place on the ‘ones to watch’ list – it does so without ever becoming uncontrollably drool-worthy.

The tone is set from the get go, ‘The Other Side Of Your Face’ kicking Color Your Life off to a hypnotic start with rippling phased guitars parsing over an unfaltering drumbeat. Singer Andrea Estella’s waifish vocals unobtrusively cut through the texture, before allowing the song to collapse into a post-rock fade out – kind of like a moving light refracting through a steadily held prism. Radio-ready single ‘Lady Daydream’ is beguilingly chilled as is ‘All Around And Away We Go’, which circles around a point of white euphoria and provides the EP’s most memorable moment. But this same moment also makes the group’s debt to the likes of Stereolab abundantly clear – and ‘Milk and Honey’ leans towards the ‘theft’ side of ‘influenced’.

While Estella’s voice takes a little while to warm to, being beautiful in the same way that Charlotte Gainsbourg is (strangely, undefinably so), Twin Sister works better with her than without. The EP’s single instrumental, ‘Galaxy Plateau’, is a piece of sinister ambience straight from the void, which acts as little more than an extended introduction to original final track ‘Phenomenons’ (the actual final track, Australia-only ‘#6’, sounds more like an undeveloped demo’).

Color Your Life is a moody little collection which suggests that as soon as the band shrug away the burden of their influences, only good things are possible.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 375, August 16th 2010