Although Psychic Twin has been active since 2011, Erin Fein, the group’s primary creative force, has a long history dating back to the late ’90s when she joined her brothers Adam and Seth as keyboardist in their band Absinthe Blind. When Adam left, the band morphed into a new group dubbed Orphans, which then became Headlights, and that group dissolved in 2012, the year after Fein released her first single as Psychic Twin.
Fein began working on the songs for her debut “solo” album, Strange Diary, in the wake of her collapsing marriage, a situation that inspired a move from her native Illinois to Brooklyn, N.Y. Fein’s material and sonic approach continued to evolve as she came to grips with the emotional upheaval of her divorce and the jarring realities of her new life in New York. The project she began in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. came to incorporate new musical ideas and new modes of translating them with a rotating support cast of players in a relatively alien environment.
The name of the project came from Fein’s feeling when she was creating demos of her songs and double-tracking her vocals, giving the sense that she was singing with some phantom version of herself. Her self-titled debut came out in 2011.
Psychic Twin’s latest release, this past June’s Chrome Sparks Meets Psychic Twin (available for free download at Bandcamp), was a 21-minute single track mash-up of several compositions that served as a teaser for her recently released debut full-length, the icy yet engaging Strange Diary, which dropped in September. Both sets feature Fein’s chilling evocation of classic Goth/Synth Pop icons like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox (both solo and with Eurythmics), Cocteau Twins and Human League, while connecting with contemporaries like St. Vincent and Grimes.
Like the best of all of them, Fein favors the chilly distance that was prevalent in ’80s Synth Pop, but invests her Psychic Twin songs with a compelling warmth and effervescence that inexorably draws the listener into her brilliant sonic ice palace.
9 p.m. Monday. Free. MOTR Pub, 1345 Main St., Over-the-Rhine, motrpub.com.
