Twin Sister – Color Your Life / Vampires With Dreaming Kids

There’s a story that goes around in the Radiohead community about the band, as a bunch of young start-ups in Oxford, wandering into a local record shop and seeing their newly released Drill E.P. on sale for 99p. When they enquired why the record was on sale for so little, the shopkeep replied that he was trying to shift it, and if they wanted, they could take it away for free. The legend goes on to say that the band actually paid full price for a copy of the C.D. before leaving the store.

It’s up to you which parts of this story you believe, really, but it does go some way to highlighting the way the internet has changed the lives of musicians. Fifteen years later, Radiohead were choosing to release an album for free onto the interwebs, the memory of their failed E.P. well in the past. Around the same time that In Rainbows was dominating headlines, two little-known bands released two startlingly well-recieved E.P.s, bands you’ve probably now heard of. Vampire Weekend and Los Campesinos! were, after releasing only an E.P. a piece, voted two of the most exciting new bands in the world in Pitchfork’s end of year poll, and went on to release debuts which, you have to assume, would not have sold in the quantities they did had they not stirred up the attention of bloggers the world over with their cheaply produced E.P.s.

Where the E.P. had long been a humble way to either test the waters of a market before a full-length release, or to showcase material deemed unsuitable for an L.P., the internet has transformed it into a full-on marketing tool, not just used to test the waters of a market but to create entirely new ones. Earlier this year, Twin Sister released both Color Your Life andVampires With Dreaming Kids onto the internet for free. (Though the latter has been available since 2008, they re-posted it as a gratis download this year.) Without going to the costly lengths of releasing an album, Twin Sister released an album’s-worth of material, created a fanbase who felt indebted to the band for their generosity with their music, and created unquantifiable amounts of hype through outlets such as this one.

I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but isn’t that just fucking genius? People were going to their shows, having not spent a penny on records, and hearing songs they knew, Twin Sister suddenly went from underground New York act to internationally known dream-pop sensations, all for the price of a few hours of recording studio time, a domain name and a bit of webspace.

You might argue that this is how all music works now – people download records for free all the time, and go to shows having not spent a penny on the music, Twin Sister have just allowed people to do it legally – but that misses the point. In those cases, the band presumably has a label who has invested money in them, in the record, in marketing, in booking venues for the band, in promotion, in hype, and in downloading their record you’re actually costing them money rather than assisting their cause. Twin Sister’s album is now one of the most hotly anticipated of next year, with minimal cost to them or their label, Domino, by giving you something you probably would have stolen anyway for free.

And yeah, giving stuff away for free in order to drum up hype or just to get people to listen to your music isn’t anything new, it wasn’t even new when Radiohead did it, but once again, that misses the point. Previously it has been done before by established acts – Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Cliff smegging Richard – or crappy bands whose records probably wouldn’t sell or weren’t selling anyway, who would release maybe two or three songs at a time. Twin Sister released 10 songs, 45 minutes, of material, and stuff of such good quality that you have to assume they would have shifted some units. What they’ve done is realise that in this transient age of torrents and mediafires and complete dearth of independent record shops, (if you have to order a record online anyway, why not just get it instantly for free?) the way to make anything out of this industry is to get known. If that means making a loss, or simply not making much money and giving stuff away for free, initially, then so be it, because now this band is on everybody’s lips and creating a sensation all over the place.

In many ways, this is one of the first real demonstrations of what Radiohead wanted to show you with In Rainbows. Because, let’s face it, a new Radiohead record would have sold hundreds of thousands anyway, and Radiohead didn’t exactly need any extra hype, but what they wanted to do was create a demonstration of how the internet could be used for good and not just evil and stealing and porn. Critics declared the experiment bunk, because of the reasons I’ve already outlined: the biggest band on the planet announcing, ten days before it came out, that they were letting people choose to have their new album for free, was hardly a fair way to demonstrate the potential of the internet as a way to get your name known if your name is already so well known. Advocates of “the Radiohead method” can now point to Twin Sister’s twin-E.P.s as hard evidence that the internet, used properly as a marketing tool to allow free expression and sharing of art, can indeed be a tool for progress, even if your name is the unheard of Twin Sister, and not Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails.

Anyhow, Domino are now releasing the E.P.s in a single package on CD and vinyl and they’re really fucking good and if you haven’t got them already or even if you have and you like them you should probably pay for them because this band is ace, they’ve got a singer that sounds a bit like Regina Spektor or sometimes that one from Lali Puna and music that makes sense in that bizarre way that dreams make sense while you’re having them, and will have you wanting to go back in the same way that dreams make you want to go back even though you can’t, but with this you can.