After releasing three albums on three different labels, Twisted Teens frontman Caspian Hollywell figured the band’s fourth might reap a lifetime’s worth of cash. Not because the singer-guitarist, who went without electricity for much of his 20s while squatting in an illegal shack in NYC, decided to clean up the garage rock group’s prolifically ramshackle approach for their Sub Pop debut, or because the indie label titan could now magically bestow permanent financial security, but because, on vacation in a little beach town in Albania, he found himself heartbroken. “If you go make a record right now, this fucking lame breakup will pay for the rest of your life,” he recalls thinking in the press bio. So after the blood, sweat, and tears of this year’s Blame The Clown and Florida Water Blues, The Holy Cross Tigers is where the temperature drops and the night thickens, abstracting even Twisted Teens’ preternaturally hook-filled sound. “To confuse is to complicate/ So it’s not so stupid to keep it simple,” Hollywell sings on ‘Armed with a Vision’. Trying hard as they might to stick to that MO, the duo’s music shines just as bright when it’s tangled up in blue.
1. Stalks
The opening track feels like starting up the engine with a knot in your throat – sure, you’ll get the car running, but make sure insurance’s got you covered. The chorus is brazen and allusive, not quite ready to wallow, but by the first verse the music’s twang bleeds into the emotional realm: “I’ll be out licking on an open wound/ Tasting all and the iron too,” Hollywell howls. As he readies himself to taste the dark side of the moon, RJ “The Razor” Santos’ piercing pedal steel and Hollywell’s colourful solo streak out both sides of the prismatic spectrum while staying on the same wavelength.
2. When We First Met
Instantly one of the most infectious songs in the band’s catalog, ‘When We First Met’ is draped in nostalgia but tinged with the anticipation of love gone awry. Hollywell even injects some youthful drama to his voice, which remains naturally weathered; he may not be able to alter the course of time, but he can control what’s on his mind, so he starts thinking about all the things they used to do together. It’s over before you realize it – the future doesn’t even need to wait out the length of an average song.
3. Be an Angel
This track, ironically, drags itself out to be the longest on the album, even as the chorus finds Hollywell pleading, “Let life quicken.” Santos’ weeping pedal steel counteracts the bitterness in his words with a touch of sentimentality. “I’m not angry/ Just confused as why I’m knowin’ you so long,” he states plainly, allowing himself to linger in the feeling a little longer.
4. Blue Rose
The first obvious instance of the band messing with the album’s rough-and-ready presentation, ‘Blue Rose’ twists itself apart at the end, as if the song could get sucked back into tape as quickly as it emerged. And this song does strike like lightning in a bottle, so visceral and driving you might not realize the lyrics turn towards poetic philosophizing, just wonky enough to avoid veering towards Instagram caption material: “So when the seed was driven from the room/ Another garden will a different flower boom.”
5. I Spend My Time Crying
Another immediate highlight, ‘I Spend My Time Crying’ loosens itself up and slows the record’s flow down. Hollywell’s guitar, acoustic this time, leaves space for Santos to trace an indelible melody, and it’s all beautiful enough for our protagonist to admit that “I was mad at you rowdy rider/ ‘Cause it was easier than being sad.” So wallow this track does, letting Santos go off with a pedal steel solo as potent and smooth as the singer would like his drink to be. If only it could help him weather the storm.
6. Blue Flower
Rising from the ashes of ‘Blue Rose’, the one-minute instrumental is a reminder that Twisted Teens aren’t your regular garage rock band, capable of mutating their sound in order to break the appearance of linearity: these things, while true, are all reconstructed from faulty memory.
7. I Bring
The distortion is dialled back up on ‘I Bring’, which seethes with frustration about little gifts slowly stripped of their meaning: a magic ring, a joke, the picture of someone in your mind. You can bring and bring and bring and still find yourself scrambling for scraps.
8. Look in the Mirror
Even more confrontational, ‘Look in the Mirror’ begins as if being dropped mid-flight – or, more accurately, in the middle of an argument. The pedal steel takes on a dreamy quality over Hollywell’s power chords, which grow more prickly the more he begs the other person to take a good look at their reflection – not just in the mirror, but “the waters of the pools of the rain as they shake with the movement of the pavement,” he sings, as if each syllable adds another second to a staring contest.
9. Lock and Key
In an interview with The New York Times, Hollywell somewhat pushed back against the idea that The Holy Cross Tigers is a breakup album, bringing up ‘Lock and Key’ – which was “inspired by a drug-running neighbor who snitched on the cartel he was working for” – as an example of off-the-cuff, circumstantial songwriting. Ten songs in, of course, it scans as an outlier on a record brimming with a hell of a lot of heartache, playful in both its narrative and stylistic details.
10. Figure It Out
Keeping the previous track’s country infections, ‘Figure It Out’ is as insistent in its rhythm as it is in its personal affirmations – the drums are as flavorful as the tune is naturally melodic, so much so that when they match up with Mel Billiard’s soaring guitarwork (appearing here for the first time on the album), cutting the outro off after less than a minute feels a little criminal.
11. Armed With a Vision
Once again beefed up by Billiard’s layered guitar, the song’s titular statement rings all the more true with each repetition. It’s as simple and meta as it sounds, though Hollywell’s clarification is not to be dismissed: “And this vision is a gun fired on confusion.” The passive voice is a little evasive; it’s not so unclear who’s holding the trigger.
12. Every Flower
Following an ambient outro, the band tends to their penchant for the surreal and apocalyptic on ‘Every Flower’, circling back to the album’s floral metaphor and even including a spoken-word passage. You can’t say that it neatly wraps up the singer’s preoccupation with the cycle of life and death, but it affirms there’s more to Twisted Teens’ music (and heartbreak) than meets the eye.
13. Darker The Night Is the Brighter I See
Hollywell does come up with a conclusion, though: ‘Darker The Night Is The Brighter I See’. After warping the arrangement slightly on ‘Every Flower’, the band maintains the ominous mood while opting for a singalong of a closer. The singalong part, of course, is the eeriest of all, “bah-bahs” fractured as if living in the same planetarium as Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend, of all things. Come morning, anything sounds possible for Twisted Teens.
