The Twerps - The TwerpsEP

Thu 10th Dec, 2009 in Music Reviews

The Twerps EP is the first in the series of releases by the one committed music fan’s legacy of a label, Charter Music. Each release comprises a single in the format of the time-honoured 7” vinyl accompanied by extra tracks on your more conventional CD.

The Twerps moniker so brilliantly reflects the cheeky inoffensiveness and slightly slap-dash nature of the band’s music, which has a really endearing recorded rehearsal-room dopey rawness to it. There’s nine songs of slightly wobbly un-polished guitar pop within, all recorded authentically unadulterated to analogue tape under the watchful eyes of Eddy Current’s Mikey Young in the producers chair.

You can’t help feeling that the songs could all just fall in a muddled heap at any given second given their mostly – and one would like to think deliberately – sloppy and clunky composition. There’s rarely more than a handful of equally scratchy and catchy guitar riffs and a couple of drum patterns making up the tunes, the vocals barely soar much higher than a slightly agitated monotone, and the lyrics were seemingly written in a teenage diary at a booth within a suburban 1950s diner, but it’s all done with such off-handed charm and just enough poise to make it work.

There are so many deft little snippets of melody woven throughout you can’t help but to be bounded along for the compulsively ramshackle ride. Remember before auto-tune and ProTools when it was just all about writing a quite good song? Remember when bands put the effort into releasing EPs that were actually collections of really great songs and not largely crappy albums you only bother downloading two or three tracks off. The Twerps and the people at Chapter Music do.

It almost feels like this will become one of those ‘the early years’ bonus discs tacked on to one of those two CD reissue deluxe edition of some classic record they’ll no doubt produce somewhere down the line. Grab this and get in on the ground floor of a great emerging band already punching well above their weight.