Chicago youngins, college drop-outs, pot-smoking misfits, the members of Twin Peaks—no, unfortunately they were unaware of the David Lynch drama series—have just recently retired from their teens. Flaunting their appreciation for classic rock and the sweet, grungy smell of teen spirit, the 20-year-olds seem freakishly young, especially considering their growing success in the Windy City (at least to this 19-year-old college student with no sight of a regular income on the horizon). They’re not even legal drinkers yet, which may put them at a disadvantage in Madison this Friday when they play at The Frequency.
Their newest album, Wild Onion, is their best material yet. To be fair, it’s also their most extensive; their 2013 album, Sunken, comes in at about 20 minutes. Nevertheless, the songs are creative, grungy, lovely, and often old-school.
An album favorite, “Mirror of Time” is as cliché as it is awesome. Like many of the album’s tracks, it deserves to be a minute longer. “Mirror” mimics the whimsical rock of The Beatles while simultaneously channeling the sweet undertones of a Cat Stevens hit.
In an interview, the band’s guitarist, Clay Frankel, described Wild Onion as “an album of rock ‘n’ roll music that sounds better the louder it is played.”
According to Frankel, “It’s really just your typical goulash of some loud rock music.”
Twin Peaks started around 2010, when Frankel and his fellow band members were in their junior year of high school. Cadien Lake James, Connor Brodner, and Jack Dolan all met at a very young age—in elementary school if not at infancy—but Frankel didn’t join the pack until high school.
The band’s four members all spent one semester in college. Frankel attended a highly acclaimed private university in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, where he studied film by “getting drunk and watching movies all the time.”
But his time away from Chicago didn’t last long.
“We all came back for a Christmas break that never ended,” Frankel said. “…I was never a big keg-drinking frat boy who goes to football games all the time. I didn’t really like (college) that much.”
He gets cooler. Apparently he lives with his old-school parents, who “don’t really believe in (the Internet).” He listens to records on his Sony turntable and repairs motorcycles just for shits and giggles. During the interview, Frankel was hard at work on a bike with drummer Brodner.
“If you’re going to buy a motorcycle and you spend less than $1,000 on it, you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to fix it,” Frankel said, dropping some last-minute pointers for potential motorcycle purchasers.
The guitarist, who wrote some of the album’s best songs, including “I Found a New Way” and “Making Breakfast,” is really just a kid. This youthful sentiment shines through every song, taking us through personal growth and unique adventures. It’s hard to say whether these built-in recollections of youthful emotions and escapades are nostalgic or inspiring.
Either way, consider that one of Frankel’s favorite music venues was a loft that somehow contained a “huge paper mache cat that blew smoke” and that he was arrested for sneaking into an abandoned hospital the day before high school graduation, shortly after jumping from the building’s second story window.
Now, this sounds a bit like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with an added topping of mushrooms. The last time the band played in Madison, most likely in some stranger’s basement about a year and a half ago—the narrative wasn’t 100 percent clear but who could blame him—this is how it went:
“Every time [the ‘guy who lived in the house’] put on a show, he would go out to different bars that were taking out the garbage, and he’d take all the bottles and bring them to his house,” Frankel shared. “After the show was over, he would just start smashing the glass bottles all around against the walls…that was pretty fun. He invited us to partake, so we all started throwing glass bottles at the wall…[I guess] he didn’t mind cleaning it all up by himself afterwards.”
So, maybe it’s a long shot to hope that The Frequency will let Twin Peaks start throwing glass bottles at the wall. But with the caliber of music that these young artists are bringing to the stage, it’ll be tough for the celebratory audience to resist.