SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: TWIN TEMPLE – DOOMED LOVERS

TWIN TEMPLE
DOOMED LOVERS
PENTAGRAMMATON RECORDS

Roy Orbison never dabbled in demon worship… as far as we know. But if he did, it’d sound like Twin Temple’s latest album Doomed Lovers.

The husband-and-wife duo are no strangers to controversy. Targeted by far-right commentator Alex Jones and dropped from country singer Charley Crockett’s tour last July due to the band’s Satanic imagery and lyrics, Twin Temple is often unfairly pigeonholed as a gimmick band. But there’s a well of emotion hidden behind the pentagrams and fake blood, and Doomed Lovers is the band’s deepest record yet.

On the title track lead singer Alexandra James croons over lush orchestration and steel guitars about the impossible thought of outliving her soulmate: “I’d take a poison snake to my naked breast/And I’d count the seconds ‘til I’m with the one I love the best.” Despite the morbid imagery, this Orbison-like number explores one of the most universal experiences: grief and undying love.

Twin Temple clearly embraces the emotional maximalism of their influences. of the 1960s are some of the most unhinged stuff ever put to wax, from Tom Jones’ “Delilah” to Wanda Jackson’s “The Box it Came In.” But what made them so good was that they were completely and utterly serious. That’s what makes Twin Temple work too. The band’s music never breaks the fourth wall or winks at the audience. It embraces the cathartic theatrical nature of old-school doo-wop, making it clear that though Alexandra and Zachary James might worship Satan, they have equal reverence for Patsy Cline.

For instance, “Love You to Death,” a solemn tune with background vocals that recall The Jordanaires, is a murder ballad about love gone wrong that culminates in a bloody front-yard stabbing, the narrator left weeping on her lover’s lane in distress. The gothic subtext becomes text in “Monster,” too: “When I wake up and haunt these dark and moonlit streets/Oh, how did you do this to me?/You made a monster out of me.” Throughout the album, Twin Temple brilliantly uses macabre imagery as a vessel to deliver theatrical and dramatic emotional content that’s rarely present in contemporary music. The band cites The Shangri-Las and The Ronettes as influences on this record, and the girl-group sound is absolutely present, but there’s also a touch of Dusty Springfield on it, too, particularly in “There’s Someone in The Walls,” a melodramatic ballad that combines the larger-than-life operatic passion of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” with the paranoid narration of the 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

If this album were a tarot card it would be the Three of Swords: a pierced heart that forces you to confront the bloody, unyielding reality of mental anguish and distress. No matter what deity you worship, Twin Temple’s Doomed Lovers will provide the ultimate catharsis for a broken heart.

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