Tweak Bird - Undercover Crops EP

Ahead of a September/October tour with legendary sludge-punks The Melvins, Illinois brothers Caleb and Ashton Bird have released a new EP of synapse-frazzling psych-metal.

The songs are short and sharp, often coming in at less than three minutes; a welcome surprise amidst a genre which tends to favour widescreen wigouts over pop sensibilities. Not that there’s very much pop about the circling, repetitive ‘Moans’, a strung-out piece of weed humour matched to swirling psychedelia. ‘People’ hits like Perry Farrell fronting Crack the Skye-era Mastodon as Caleb rants ‘So many people in the world, I don’t wanna be one’. The tongue-in-cheek ‘Bunch O’ Brains’ opens on a repetitive two chord riff, lulls you into a false sense of security with a few seconds of silence then explodes into life once more.

A great strength of Tweak Bird is that even in short bursts they still sound massive. Ashton’s drums sound like someone ramming a bulldozer through a forest whilst his brother conjures up gigantic Sabbath-like riffs up-front. Reviews of their 2010 debut tended to focus on the jazz influences, possibly in a bid to make it appear palatable to a more indie audience whose interest in anything metallic doesn’t really extend beyond pre-distressed Iron Maiden t-shirts from Topman, but even with those influences mostly absent here there is no denying that Tweak Bird offer a thrilling ride.

7.8

Max Sefton 

Tweak Bird - People

Tweak Bird are the answer to question "What would Oasis sound like if they smoked way too much weed and decided to pay homage to Spiritualized rather than The Beatles?"

With psychedelic wailing harmonies and swathes of reverb-laden guitars, the Illinois homegrowns have made quite the comeback on 'People' following from their self titled effort back in 2010. It's one of those tracks that sounds effortlessly cool as you suspect that despite their image, these guys might actually give a shit about making good music. And remarkably for a stoner-rock outfit, it's not disposable and throwaway like so many other male duos in the field that have fallen off the hype wave in recent years (Who are Bleeding Knees Club again?).

This is good stuff, and is generously available for free download from their soundcloud.
Look out for their forthcoming mini album 'Undercover Crops' on October 9th too, if it's as good as this track we could be hearing a lot more from these two.

Toby McCarron