Cinedork.com/Review/ Jan 2011
Just because it’s Americana doesn’t mean it has to come from America. Consistently for the past eight years, Canada’s Twilight Hotel has been making some of the best and most compelling Americana out there. (They did recently relocate to Austin, TX, but we’ll let them keep claiming Canada.) The band has just released it’s third album, When the Wolves Go Blind, a terrific example of their strongest elements, with almost no faults or missteps.
The band regularly consists of only two members: Brandy Zdan and Dave Quanbury. Both sing, and more than any instrumentation, it is the mixing and melding of their voices that makes the songs memorable. Where Dave’s voice can be soft, nearly whispery, Brandy’s is brash and strong, and the contrast elevates the songs beyond mere folky exercises or alt-country routines. The pace on this album, as on past ones, is slow without dragging, steady without boring.
This album incorporates cosmopolitan touches like the accordion on the title track and “What Do I Know About Love?”. The effect is something like klezmer Americana, unexpected and, unexpectedly, quite welcome. Similarly, the instrumental song “The Darkness” incorporates saxophone for a smoky, dirty jazz club effect, without ever moving the band away from their alt-country base.
One standout track is “Mahogany Veneer,” a kind of dark roadtrip story, mapping both personal and national disasters onto the American South. The band readily acknowledge their outsider (read: Canadian) status: driving around Memphis, Dave sings, “All the boarded buildings made me long for Winnipeg.” The Canadian perspective taking in American devastation is a compelling one, but the song isn’t without Canadian tragedies as well. The band eventually must “haul 16 hours back” to bury a friend who has committed suicide. Throughout it all, the instrumentation loops and replays the same riff, a kind of steady rolling onwards that comes to stand for both the endless road and the endless passage of time through life.
Songs like “Frozen Town” and “The Master” are mellower sketches without that forward driving momentum, but no less captivating for being so.
This is the kind of classic, consistently quality music that we wish more bands today were making. Let’s hope Austin is good to Twilight Hotel, so they can keep doing what they do.
9 out of 10
