Twin Princess
Blood Moon
May 26, 2023
(Self Release)
PHOTO CREDIT:
CLICK PHOTO FOR HI-RES JPG
ALBUM COVER
Philadelphia’s synth-pop-sun, doom-country-rising Twin Princess forge a mirrorball-lit realm in Blood Moon, their first full-length album. Its shimmering, gloom-tinged songs carry a fanged tenderness, a vulnerable resilience — through vibrant emotion and a steady candor, the mundane becomes mystical. Here, revelation and renewal can happen in the cold light of a midnight CVS; revisiting and reevaluating memories of a city or sidewalk or bathtub that changed you proves as transformative as the lived moment; flowers poking through snow in winter become omens of perennial desire.
Led by Pauli Mia (she/her) on vocals and synth, Twin Princess features Adam Dasilva (they/them) on guitar, Kirby Vibek (he/him) on drums, and Eric Schueler (he/they) on bass. The band began as a duo project between Mia and Ryan Ficano (he/him), who served as the lead engineer and producer for the album. Blood Moon honors and elevates the precedents set by 2020 debut EP Fraise and its 2021 stripped-down piano reimagining, Fraise: Side B.
Blood Moon opens with “Flood,” an alluring prelude whose first lines center memory under examination: “I remember clawing at the walls / It was not the same / But close.” Before it, Fraise opened with “Blossom,” which begins “These days I dwell on memories / Blossom black and blue” and later laments “Every time I think I know anything at all / I realize and see the lies I told myself and I fall.” In Blood Moon, the band’s central preoccupation with memory unfurls like a strip of photo negatives. Time blurs — past is future is present, woven indiscernibly. In “Pasadena,” visions of a world further into climate disaster are anchored in current grapplings (“I’m left, I’m not lost, I'm lonely, I’m hopeful”). In the title track, a long-ago event is both colored by childhood pain and prophetic of cycles that feel like curses.
At times, the songs suggest feelings of stagnancy or regression, a sense of defeat in returning the lows you thought you had overcome for good. In “Allston,” the album’s cinematic zenith, there is a frantic pleading: “Who knew it would come to this? I’ve run away time and time and time again.” But this isn’t a record of running away. Or else, it is not about evasion. It is about escape, both for and from oneself.
As an evocative vocalist and deft lyricist, Mia proves an incisive historian of feeling and of memory. She documents her past selves with sharp compassion, approaches the quotidian with the gravity of a tarot reading. She presents opposites as essential to each other rather than in contradiction: self-sabotage and then self-rescue, portraits of oneself at rock bottom and then oneself climbing out, hands bloody; desire met with ravenous indulgence in one song and resolute restraint in the next; bolder in the face of old, enduring fears — stronger, but softer, too.
Before giving way to the rest of the album, to songs for dancefloor catharsis and quiet reflection, “Flood” gives us a penultimate line that is half caution, half spell: “You’ve got to want to get out.” Fraise: Side B featured an early version of the song, which was — in part because of its sparse piano arrangement — far more mournful, almost despairing.
Like the astrological significance of its namesake, Blood Moon is about change: the cycle of running and rapture and reflection necessary to, as Mia says, “[break] down the self to make room for new healing” — again and again and again.
Twin Princess On Tour
For more information, please contact:
Eric Bennett
eric@luckybirdmedia.com