Mr Twin Sister: "Blush"

Front page photo by Kimi Selfridge

Long Island doesn’t really do good taste. I’m allowed to say this without getting a fist-pump to the jaw because I grew up an hour away from Penn Station on the LIRR surrounded by Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, flea-ridden punk houses, and way too many Operation Ivy tattoos. I’ve come to appreciate these things now but, as a high-schooler in the late-1990s, they represented everything stifling about the suburban wasteland, man. There was no hope. I needed to get out, preferably soundtracked by a Springsteen song.

Even after the internet blew open understood ideas of taste and musical geography, this hasn’t completely changed: There still aren’t a shit-ton of cool bands coming out of Smithtown, as far as I know. But there is Mr Twin Sister. Sure, some of the group’s members may have moved away from the Island by now but, like all of us, they’ll never totally leave. This is the charismatic, nuanced, smart local band I never knew.

After being chewed-up and spit-out by the modern buzz factory—including a choppy debut album on Domino—it was unclear if they’d just settle for an upstairs rental in Northport and leave those crazy cool-Long-Island-band dreams to die. But now they’re back, and they’re better. Just listen to “Blush”, which has classic Portishead smoking in the same studio as headwrap-era Erykah Badu. It’s sexy, shadowy, string-laden. You can disappear in it. And as it fades out, there’s even a back-alley sax solo Billy Joel could love.


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