twinkranes

Dublin trio Twinkranes were spotted by Twisted nerve head honcho Andy Votel and signed up after one of their always impressive, mind expanding live experiences. 'Spektrumtheatresnakes' sees the band with the suitably adventurous monikors Blonde Fox, Rooster and Auburn Spinner, hone their psychedelia down to seven pulsating tracks with barely the nine minute mark troubled. Taking the rhytmic devotion of dance music as their alter, they conjure up an impressive from drums, bass & synths. Recorded live in the studio over three intense days, they capture the lysergic mood perfectly. A singular courages trip into rhythum, sounding at once organic and other wordly.


Nick Annan - CLASH MAGAZINE

These Dubliners Know their Onions when it comes to space-rock- meaning more than just the right names and tunes to drop into conversation. Their debut album is primetime psych rock lunacy, a heart stopping barage of frenzied krautrock rhythums, extraterrestrial synth strops, technicolored guitars and monster monster grooves. The latter are a fine example of Twinkranes' musical prowess and of how they balance restraint with a propulsive desire to hard-nose their way down the highway. Instead of finding themselves stuck in some kind of energetic but endless loop like some other Neu! and silver apples disciples, tracks such as Witch hunt and the Charmer show how the Kranes relay on hypnotic allure, swaggering panache and a ruthless adherance to the plan to keep them from stylistic dead ends. To infinity and beyond.

Jim Carroll - THE IRISH TIMES

"Psychedelic Dublin trio make glorious mess"



Pardon our potty mouth, but Twinkranes debut is a fucking mess of a record. However, its a great mess. Not afraid to place a filthy baseline that sounds like 'Bomber' by Motorhead right beside a tribal drumbeat and hippy vocals ("Witch hunt"), the psychedelic trio from Dublin display a thrilling sense of adventure. Fusing elements of dance, prog, punk and (most importantly)krautrock. Spektrumtheatresnakes is filthier than a rummage through Lady GaGa's Knicker drawer - all seven tracks provide excellent examples of just how powerful "outsider" music can be. 'High tekk train wrekk' bludgeons you over the head with thumping drum fills. 'Fizz Nor Feedback' is a trippy buzzy joy to hear and 'The Charmer' is an insane nu-jazz jam that could soundtrack a collective freakout in Charles Mansons cell. Legend has it that Twinkranes recorded their album live in three days, and you can almost see the sweat drip off the walls on songs such as 'Put up a light'. While some may baulk at the oddness of the record, it's easily one of the best irish releases of the year. So go on, take a walk on the weird side. You wont regret it.

Edwin Mc Fee - HOT PRESS MAGAZINE

"URGENT NEO-KRAUTROCK FROM SOUTHERN IRELAND"

A Dublin trio with colourful names, Twinkranes (drummer/vocalist Blonde fox, gutarist Rooster and keyboardist Auburn Spinner) are not the first combo explicitly indebted to the mesmeric Ur-grooves of Neu! and their teutonic '70s ilk, but they may yet be the most persuasive. Darker and more dissonant than fellow passres of the kraut pipe like Fujiya & Miyagi, their debut's seven, elongated tracks are marked by vigourous drumming flecked with variously textured guitar. evanescent synths and wafting, numinour vocals. Thus, Witch hunt's robotic-meets-plainsong harmonies and pulsing sequencers suggest 154-era Wire produced by Giorgio Moroder, The Market Of The Bizzarre's inside-out beats and detached vocals evoke Can, while Put Up a Light is a throbbing upgrade of Silver Apples' Oscillations.


David Sheppard - MOJO MAGAZINE

Twinkranes - 'Spektrumtheatresnakes' Krautrock, but with less beards and more dancing


Put this incredible album on and, from the first second of opener High Tekk Train Wreck everyone regardless of musical persuasion sits up and asks, What the hell is that? The answer is that its a fantastically unhinged mix of speeded-up krautrock rhythms, dirty drones and wonky synthesizers, which is at once weird and danceable and very pop; as a case in point, The Charmer sounds like Britney Spears Womanizer as played by New York experi-mental duo Silver Apples. All we know about Twinkranes is they come from Dublin, there are three of them called Blonde Fox, Rooster and Auburn Spinner. But with sounds like this, who needs biog and sensible names?

Nathaniel Cramp - NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS (NME)

If you had to sum up Twinkranes' debut album in one word, the first that springs to mind is �intense�. Not intense in a thrash metal style display of raw male emotion, but intense in another, more difficult to pinpoint, way. Essentially, Spektrumtheatresnakes is an open tribute to all things krautrock, but there is way more going on here than merely another band who sound like Neu!

Dublin�s hottest new things, Twinkranes are a power trio with a penchant for the psychedelic, and a razor sharp pop sensibility, they have created an absolute juggernaut of an album, stamping across the musical landscape like a sonic Godzilla after a few too many G&Ts.

Spektrumtheatresnakes may only have seven tracks, but each one is so urgent that the whole thing comes across as the musical representation of the march towards destruction. An intensifying build-up throughout the entire piece whilst still each and every song remains solid as an armoured tank, it comes across like Queens of the Stone Age after a heavy weekend jamming with Holy Fuck on Red Bull with Trent Reznor supplying the instruments and additional chanting from LA noiseniks HEALTH.

The results are sometimes even danceable, if you can dance in the zoned-out middle-space that Twinkranes occupy musically. As electrifying as the music is, it becomes hypnotic. Power drums, grimy synths and giggly keyboards combine to create rich and bountiful musical textures, and it chugs and bubbles and oozes its way throughout creating an almost tribal atmosphere, full of instinctual noises designed to bring those making them, somehow closer to God.

Across it�s breadth, Spektrumtheatresnakes gives us the schizophrenic Sonic Youth dancing with The Rapture of 'High Tekk Train Week', the sound of Jean Michel Jarre in the middle of a nervous breakdown that is 'The Charmer', the deceptively more restrained 'Put Up A Light', which belts off halfway through with an attack from a beast hybrid of Add N To (X) and Depeche Mode before leaving us with 'Spores', an epic and gigantic piece which sounds like the natural amalagamation of everything before it. A metaphorical bow from the cast, it is like an orchestra of every vaguely noisy band that ever exists at some sort of noisenik rave.

For those of you that like your music to be intense and cerebral, you�ll love Spektrumtheatresnakes. Despite the multitude of influences, it is a truly unique album, and timeless too. This could�ve been recorded at any point in the last 40 years and it would still sound contemporary, yet futuristic. An exciting and intriguing debut. - Steve Gislam - SUPER SWEET

An explosive launch for Dublin’s space-rock programme

Krautrock obsessives are our kind of people, and Twinkranes – a “psychedelic power trio” from Dublin – have commendably taken it upon themselves to filter Krautrock’s weighty influences through the sensuous prism of pop and dance music.

Accordingly, Anto (aka Blonde Fox), Rooster and Ray (aka Auburn Spinner) lock into their urgently speeding motorik grooves with an absolutely livid, murderous focus, and proceed to ride them into the deck while subtly teasing out those warped and giddy psych curlicues. On the face of it, High Tekk Train Wreck, The Charmer and Witch Hunt do the Neu! thing with panache; hypnotic four-to-thefloor drumming and questing, sepulchral, heavily processed guitars and synths. However, where Neu! always sounded as though they were accelerating towards the crest of a hill which never arrived, Twinkranes sound as though they’re permanently teetering on the edge of a precipice. Their eerily unresolved chord suspensions factor in a deliciously unbearable air of tension, while their tireless, bloody-minded forward thrust resembles Suicide at their most intransigent.

The stunned, dislocated and doggedly cyclical Spores rounds out the experience like a thousand-yard-stare comedown. A highly persuasive debut.
4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars - RECORD COLLECTOR

From the dizzying highs of acid to the chemical overdrive of speed, Spektrumtheatresnakes emulates in music a wider drug variety than Hunter S Thompson’s briefcase, and even the good doctor didn’t take it all at once.

Like a sadistic fairground ride in primary colours, ‘The Market of the Bizarre’ spirals and loops around marching percussion and a hypnotic vocal line. ‘Fizz Nor Feedback’ subjects any acid heads that were letting their minds wander in the previous tracks to dense, pill-charged club rhythms - a bastardisation of Pink Floyd and The Prodigy. The heavy and psychotic, bass dominated nature also brings to mind the club antics of Primal Scream, particularly Xtrmntr.

Razor sharp synths and off key organs pierce through the haze like metal under fingernails, setting teeth on edge, frightening women and children, refusing any attempts to gasp for air. There’s no chance for a rest, the hunt must go on, but before fading into the mad, moonless night, ‘Spores’ combines Stoner Metal drones and some nods to German prog-lords Can.

For all their more modern influences such as Krautrock and dance music, Twinkranes are really anchored in late 60’s psychedelia, in the paranoia that only civil unrest and meaningless war can grant (an era which grows somewhat familiar). Harbouring more than a few blood chilling sights along the way, Twinkranes heady jams are the classic work of creative exploration and drug nightmares - the cocktail is highly addictive.

Brendan Morgan - BEARDED MAGAZINE