Daniel Topete
These Chicago-based garage rockers still like to get down and dirty on stage.
When you’re close to something, it’s sometimes a little harder to see it. Maybe that’s why Cadien Lake James, the guitarist/lead singer for the ’60s-inspired garage rockers Twin Peaks, is still sorta wrapping his head around the evolution he and his Chicago-based bandmates have undergone over the past few years. After all, they were green 19-year-olds the last time they toured, in support of their 2014 rough-‘n’-ragged second album Wild Onion. Now those formative years are having an effect — the sound the band’s fronting on its forthcoming third album, Down in Heaven (it’s due out in mid-May) is both deeper and more polished.
“It struck me that people are calling it smoother, sharper,” says James, who’ll bring his band to the Frequency on Feb. 24 for a set with Uh Bones and the Rashita Joneses. “I guess we just made it sound nicer.”
Some of that has to do with the circumstances under which the band’s new disc was recorded. Instead of locking themselves in a studio and rushing through recording 16 songs in 14 days, as they did for Wild Onion, the band spent a luxurious summer month recording at a friend’s house in Massachusetts. The influences are, naturally, ’60s-based, but these have shifted, too: Where James was bingeing on glam-rock when he wrote the songs for Wild Onion, Heaven is informed by a heaping helping of classic, Americana rock. When Spin magazine recently noted that the albums James cited as influences on Down in Heaven — things like the Kinks’ Village Green Society and the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet — are all from 1968, he was surprised.
“It felt a lot more purposeful,” says James of the experience of creating Heaven. “It wasn’t as giddy. We gained assets with the second album, but we lost the sense that this was our piece of art. We wanted that back.”
It sounds like they’ve got it. The bigger factor is the band’s new fifth member — keyboardist Colin Croom, a longtime friend of the band who helped engineer and co-produce Twin Peaks’ second album while gigging with his own band, Sister Crystals. Croom’s a full-time Peaker now, and his contributions are immediately evident on tunes like “Walk to the One You Love,” the first single from Down in Heaven. His piano and organ work both broadens the band’s musical horizons and sends it deeper into Kinks and Cream territory.
But don’t think for a second that the album’s more polished sound translates to the band’s live performances — this is still an outfit with strong garage and punk-rock roots, and they like to get as down and dirty as possible on stage.
“I’ve always held in high regard bands who can make you shake your ass,” says James. “We just always want to keep the energy high.”
