Album Review: Twin Forks - 'Twin Forks'

Whether you are listening to Further Seems Forever or Dashboard Confessional, the presence of Chris Carrabba's vocals and style seem to make everything else less important. Really these various projects are just his vehicles, his different seasons. FSF was his youth, loud and heavy. With Dashboard he got a little older and chilled out a bit, and now with Twin Forks even more so. It has a mandolin in it for example.

Basically if you grew up with Carrabba, he is helping your tastes age with each new project. So now his folky singer/songwriter tunes have their first full length, and this one is the biggest test for his fans as it completely embraces the Americana vibe.

The subject matter hasn't changed, Carrabba is still singing about his relationship woes and triumphs albeit with a far less weight about what he is saying, it seems as though his opinions and thoughts have relaxed a little along with his music.

The music, acoustic based with various little colours of instrumentation strewn throughout, follows the folk and country track pretty closely. The standout however comes in the vocal harmonies, which are the true strength of this album and perfected in a way unlike any before (for Carrabba), mainly due to the male/female pairing.

The recording is something slightly different to past efforts as well. It is far less polished, not in a way that things sound bad by any means, just, like everything else, more relaxed, maybe the guitar tone at times isn't, or there is a heavy use of room mics, whatever it is it suits the genre perfectly. Over polishing music like this would make it sound fake, whereas the raw sound of this debut lets you know that it is more so from Carrabba's heart than ever before.

While we appreciate the fact the we are all getting older, I don't feel comfortable with Chris Carraba, who soundtracked my youth, reminding me of it with music of this kind. He sounds more comfortable in Twin Forks than ever before, and it is a great album full of well written songs, but personally we're not quite ready to resign to the rocking chair on the front porch just yet.

1. Can't Be Broken

2. Cross My Mind

3. Back To You

4. Kiss Me Darlin'

5. Scraping Up The Pieces

6. Something We Just Know

7. Danger

8. Reasoned And Roughned

9. Plans For Ya

10. Done

11. Come On

12. Who's Looking Out