Between 2008 and 2011, Washington’s Colleen Johnson and Evan Hashi got together under the moniker Twig Palace, becoming a notable if short-lived force in Olympia’s late-00s scene. The pair have since gone on to play in a variety of other bands, from Reighnbeau, Mega Bog, Flying Circles and Silver Shadows, to The Hive Dwellers, Upside Drown, The Mumlers, Lazer Zeppelin, Will Sprott and Little Angry & The Sweets. Like many of the scene champions before them, Twig Palace were lost amid the rise of their predecessors, their music buried if not quite forgotten.
That is, until Antiquated Future began an excavation. The next instalment of the Selected Songs series, kicked off by Fred Thomas’s Another Song About Riding the Bus, Your Most Secret Name (Selected Songs 2008-2011) digs through self-released CDs and out of print compilations to form the definite guide to the Twig Palace. Both as a way to remember their impact, preserve their influence, and garner a new audience for their playful pop retro style.
The best introduction is lead single ‘Tin Bees’, which is able to wrap up all the oddness, sweetness and unpredictability of Twig Palace’s music into less than two minutes. It’s ingrained with a sense of joy, the infectiousness of its almost staccato repetitive melody proving hard to resist. Johnson and Hashi swap vocal duties across the collection, and here they come together with glee. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t know me by now,” they sing in a typically strange but charming opening line, “I’ve got tin bees tapping on the roof of my mouth, and I’ve set my watches to tick in time with your pulse.”
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‘Paragraph on a Pin’s Head’ again shows of the band’s erratic nature, segueing from an acapella intro (“An egg hatched in your skull and the bird flies out”) to moments of tender almost-silence, a hymn-like middle section to frantic spikes of jubilant indie pop. The loose-limbed ‘TA-X2i’ flickers into life like a Sunday morning dawn and grows into something bright and glad, while ‘Nautilus Teeth’ and ‘Where Land Meets the Sky’ show a more wistful side, and songs like ‘Pangea’ possess a creeping, infectious energy that pulls the listener into its taut rhythms. Across sixteen songs, Your Most Secret Name reinforces Twig Palace as one of the most inventive and distinctive bands from a fertile period of indie music, preserving their music and extending their influence even further.
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Your Most Secret Name (Selected Songs 2008-2011) is out now via Antiquated Future and you can get it from Bandcamp.