- The enigmatic UK duo take a leap into the uncanny valley on their new EP of strange, sometimes uncomfortable club jams.
- "You have passed the scanner. Now, let's party," says a robotic voice during a heart-stopping moment of silence on "mind_flip," a track from Two Shell's new EP, lil spirits. "mind_flip" has what we now know as all the Two Shell trademarks: a heavily oscillating volume effect that makes it feel like the music is whizzing past you, cut-up chipmunk vocals, a broken beat somewhere between the rush of hard techno, jungle and hyperpop.
The duo have hit upon something that feels both deeply silly and weirdly serious, their music becoming a world-building exercise in which they've built their own miniature universe out of the digital detritus others left behind. Always a fan of repurposing sounds and styles into a Jeff Koons-like fantasia of vibrant colour and gummy bear texture, lil spirits takes it a step further into the uncanny valley, building Candyland structures for their weird little characters to live in.
lil spirits features plenty of voices, but even more than before, they're stretched beyond recognition, syllables cut and phrasing garbled. (It reminds me of the AI-generated vocals on Jaymie Silk's recent Artificial Realness EP.) The vocal on the 2-steppy "iMessage" lands at a weird part of the rhythm, like it was placed askew in the DAW grid, the first sign that something's wrong here. Over each of these tracks, the vocals appear to change gender, mood and disposition to the point where they no longer sound human. For example on "bluefairy," an anguished rapper says, "Mommy, I can't swim in shark-infested waters" with an anxious urgency. But following a strange dialogue interlude—"Sandwiches for all!"—the track pivots on its heel and turns deliriously happy, the vocal mangled beyond recognition into a feeling that doesn't really exist on the familiar emotional spectrum. Shit's weird.
These are strange, sometimes challenging tracks, far from the club ecstasy of "home." Only "love him," with its soft-touch A. G. Cook synth stabs, approaches anything like normalcy, its cutesy bleeps and brunoised vocal snippets cohering into a gently playful hook. The rest of the EP flitters and darts around like a famished hummingbird, beats falling out of place, vibes shifting and random voices squawking out surprisingly emotional phrases that eventually get the meaning choked out of them anyway.
It all careens into "♡here4u♡," a tender and quiet track that sounds more like a prayer than anything else. You can call their antics gimmicky, their music over-the-top, but the amount of ground that Two Shell cover on lil spirits is impressive, and more importantly, it's their ground. From throwback anthems to inscrutably futuristic club bangers, the duo reflect our generation's information overload and aesthetic brinkmanship back on us. Just like you'd expect, it's thrilling and occasionally uncomfortable.
Tracklist01. iMessage
02. love him
03. mind_flip
04. bluefairy
05. ♡here4u♡