A rapture of opposites: Twin, the new album by American Cream Band, gives sound to dualities, dreams ambivalences and stages, between them, a ghost dance that undermines every clearly manifested meaning. Between jazzy, rock’n’roll-tinged dance tracks and psychedelically shimmering dreamscapes, an album unfolds that does not seek to resolve contradictions, but lets them exist alongside one another. Male and female voices, driving grooves and meditative moments, Krautrock, funk and art-pop do not form opposites here, but two sides of the same movement.
Precisely for that reason, Twin touches a nerve in the present. At a time when the world increasingly demands unequivocal meaning, American Cream Band opts for ambiguity. The album does not ask how contradictions might be overcome, but how they can be endured. Perhaps that is exactly where its greatest quality lies. As in the idea of coincidentia oppositorum cited by Nathan Nelson, opposites here do not fall apart, but find a new unity in the music. The record therefore almost feels like a musical kairos: an album that recognises the right moment because it has the courage not to resolve the contradictoriness of our present, but to make it audible.
Twin
