Mr Twin Sister: "In the House of Yes"

Mr Twin Sister‘s reinvention continues apace on their new single, “In the House of Yes”. The Long Island band’s last album, 2011′s In Heaven, shuttled between dream-state aesthetics inspired by Sofia Coppola and David Lynch—heck, it even borrowed its title from Eraserhead‘s theme song—but they still scanned as an indie-pop outfit, distinctly American and distinctly suburban. (Nothing wrong with that; so are Coppola and Lynch, in their own ways.) But somewhere between that album and gaining the prefix in front of their new name, the band formerly known as Twin Sister seems to have ventured abroad in search of a distinctly European kind of sophistication.

Last month, “Blush” channeled Sade via Portishead like some velvety Vogue editorial set on the banks of the Seine, and new single “In the House of Yes” flashes back to the sounds of the French touch at its most opulent. The song’s swirling strings and flickering tendrils of guitar specifically invoke Alan Braxe and Ben Diamond’s classic remix of Björk’s “Alarm Call”, while Andrea Estella’s rounded vowels and oddly bitten diction even recall the Icelandic singer herself. But the song goes way beyond mere pastiche. The pneumatic pianos and wispy atmospherics also suggest Black Box as remixed by Vladislav Delay; it’s slinky, seductive, and somehow timeless. “I’m in the mood/ To let the rhythm push me out of my head,” Estella sings, locked in her room with a drink or three inside her—a paean to letting go and cutting loose. It’d be hard to find a sentiment less compatible with Puritans’ fear of losing control.

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