Twin Peaks is the sound of four guys, each barely old enough to drink legally, having fun doing what they love. Drummer Connor Brodner, bassist/vocalist Jack Dolan, guitarist/vocalist Clay Frankel and guitarist/vocalist Cadien Lake James grew up together on Chicago’s North Side, each a lover of Rock & Roll in its various guises — from ’60s Garage Rock and Psych Pop to ’70s Punk to ’80s Indie outfits like The Replacements, to whom Twin Peaks has often been compared.
The quartet’s 2013 debut, Sunken, was a lo-fi gem — short, sweet and full of vigor. Their 2014 follow-up, the 16-song Wild Onion, expands the group’s vision in ways both obvious (“Telephone,” which comes on like an homage to the The Replacements’ “Answering Machine”) and surprising (“Ordinary People,” which sounds like The Beach Boys via Galaxy 500).
CityBeat recently connected with Frankel via phone to discuss the band’s evolution from scrappy high school buddies to crafters of an eclectic record like Wild Onion.
CityBeat: The first time I saw you guys was at a house show in Chicago. The second time was a year or so later at last year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. I was curious how you guys would do in a bigger setting, and it was just as raucous as ever. How do you approach these bigger shows? Do you do anything differently?
Clay Frankel: We really try not to. We try our best to play the same no matter where you might see us, but it really depends on the crowd. If anything, we might feel a little colder in big festival settings because it’s hard to connect with the crowd when they’re behind a barricade and they all just blur together. You’re not going to change your whole fucking game plan just because you play a bigger show. We’re going to do what we do. But, yeah, it’s a little daunting. I remember Pitchfork was the first time I got pretty nervous before show. I hate playing shows during the daylight. It’s the worst.
CB: Was that you who stage-dived during the Pitchfork set?
CF: I don’t know, man. I can’t really be accountable for the things I do on stage anymore.
CB: Wild Onion is more ambitious than the debut in nearly every way. How did you approach this one as a band?
CF: We were just writing songs, because that’s just what we do. That’s how I have a good time. I think the ambition came out of being on the road so long and just playing the same eight songs from our first record. We wanted to start playing some new stuff. We wanted to put everything down, which was smart I guess in the long run because after the new album came out, here we are on the road like all the time again, and at least we have more songs to play so we can play different sets and things like that.
CB: It seems like you guys took a lot of care in the sequencing of the new one — it has a definite ebb and flow in terms of tone and feel.
CF: We’ve always been conscious of albums that flow. Those are always my favorite albums — albums that you listen to and it’s like if you hear one song on the radio from a record you really like and it ends and you almost expect to hear that other riff from the next song on the album just because it goes together so well. We all just sat down and just tried different orders to the songs until we found one that flowed pretty nicely and wasn’t boring and wasn’t too much. At least it didn’t seem like too much to me. There are a lot of songs and shit, and they’re all different, but it’s still only 40 minutes long.
CB: Every time I listen to the album and get to “Strange World,” which is so dreamy and languid, I expect it go on forever, and then it just fades out after 90 seconds. Is there an alternate version of that song that goes on for five or six minutes?
CF: That just how Cadien wrote it; that’s how he intended it to be. We’ve always been fans of short songs. It’s almost sweeter that way. If you have a nice idea, you don’t really want to beat someone over the head with it and make them listen to it for like five minutes, like U2 or someone. If you have something really special to do that would take five minutes to say, then you should do it, but if you can write “God Only Knows” in two minutes and 30 seconds, then just leave it at that.
CB: Cadien has mentioned that Wild Onion was heavily influenced by The Beach Boys and (The Rolling Stones’) Exile on Main Street …
CF: Yeah, we were listening to Exile quite a bit going into the studio. And we do like The Beach Boys quite a bit. They’re just good bands that put out good records that don’t get boring to listen to them over and over again.
CB: I read that you guys talked about fitting as many songs on each side of the album as you could without making it a double album, which obviously means you had the vinyl version in mind when it came to putting the songs together. Where does that devotion to the physical vinyl version come from?
CF: That’s just the way we enjoy music. To listen to the record is to have the record, to see what it looks like. There is something to how bands split a record in half, how some songs are on one side, then you get a little break and flip it over. Having two intro songs on a record when you flip it over is cool. Having certain records where you like putting on side B first because you like those songs better than the songs on side A, that’s just how we grew up listening to music. I’ve never been one to just listen to one song by one band. There’s a reason why people make an album. Listening to it should almost be like an event in your bedroom.
TWIN PEAKS perform Saturday at the West Side’s
Martini Church. Tickets/more info is available at
cincyticket.com .
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2015.