Twin Peaks - Lookout Low

Fewer bands have trodden a stranger career path than Chicago's Twin Peaks. Together, remarkably, almost a decade now, they set off when still in their early teens, as hormonal a bunch as you were ever likely to chance upon. and have since made their way to a place, with their recently released fourth album where they seem to want nothing quite so much as make their way back to the early Seventies, when the hair was long, the weed was strong, and the possibilities of Rock and Roll seemed utterly infinite.

An odd state of affairs. Listening through to Lookout Low I was minded of Almost Famous, with the pubescent Cameron Crowe on the road with Stillwater witnessing things that were frankly quite beyond his ken. Twin Peaks have doubtless accrued a wealth of experience in their years treading the boards, but that hardly makes them The Band. Not just yet. Yet The Band is exactly what they come across as wanting to be.

Recorded in Monnow Valley in Wales and produced by the esteemed Ethan Jones, Lookout Low is languid, strung out and utterly chilled. Twin Peaks are in many ways a band of brothers like they used to make back in the day, not just The Band, but The Allman Brothers, The Stones, The Faces or The Doobie Brothers or any number of others. Groups simply don't come across like this anymore. But Twin Peaks do.

They write together, take turns at the mic, (main vocals are divided between four members of the band), and it's clear this is very much a communal concern, no one hogs the spotlight and they play with the assured swing of a band that know each other back to front and inside out. If this comes across as a slightly odd exercise in historical ventriloquism, there are moments when they lock utterly into a groove and issue forth moments and songs genuinely worthy of Music from Big Pink or Exile on Main Street. So if the whole thing doesn't always have the impact they'd like it to, (mainly because the vocals occasionally lack the conviction of the playing), they're a band that have very much earned their spurs. It'll be interesting to watch where they're headed to next.