Twin Shadow -‘Confess.’ (4AD)

A quantum leap on from his debut album, Forget, this album may have been out for a few weeks now, but that doesn’t

mean I have been enjoying it. Whereas his debut was linked in with the chillwave movement (AKA the movement that made it OK for H

ipsters to listen to 80s AOR without having to be, y’know, ironic about it), th

is time the template -crafted in his o

wn image -is more in the style of early 80s new

wave pop.

The biker look on the front suggests that George Lewis Jr -as he’s known to his mum- is taking no prisoners. ‘Can’t You see I’m not in love’ he sings on ‘Run My Heart’, and he does not mean it in the way 10CC did. Yet this is an easy album to get

to grips with. If, as one album suggests that he’s ring-fencing his heart, this is

not a hard album to love. Far from it. First single ‘Five Seconds’ remains one of the best tracks I have heard this year. It’s a darker album lyrically, yet poppier in its approach -without (as you will have gathered by now) being sugar-coated in any way.

If it seems unlikely that 4AD would have put out an album sounding like this in 1982, somehow it makes perfect sense in 2012. And thus, the underground and mainstream evolve…

Confess is out now on 4AD

Stream it at his website