Can’t fault the ambition: ‘Excite the Light’ is the first instalment in a trilogy, and this is part one. They’ve been busy despite – or perhaps because of lockdown, rerecording their debut album and releasing videos for all seven of the tracks, too.
Lyrically, the songs on this EP are pretty personal, and there are some impactful lines that deal with mental health and the impacts of childhood experience that remind me of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This be the verse’, with its unforgettable and eternally resonant opening line, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’
But for all that, the impact is lost in the delivery, and as a band who cite Iron Maden as major influences, it’s perhaps fair to day that your appreciation of Twisted Illusion is down to whether or not you’re a fan or Iron Maden, given their operatic vocals and a general sound of overblown excess. It’s not that the songs are and – they’re not – they’re just badly bloated.
‘Medicated Society’ does go a bit more prog, and comes on like Amplifier lite with additional hints of Soundgarden, and the last track, the fourteen-minute ‘Twisted Illusion’ is something of a signature tune for the band, or would be if it weren’t so cumbersome. They do a god job of building the brooding atmospherics with some grunge dynamics that passes a nod to Alice in Chains and Nirvana before going full Metallica / Maden.
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The execution is faultless, and, as I said, you can’t fault the ambition. It’s just that as a set, it’s all a bit much.
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