{"id":14638,"date":"2025-07-22T05:15:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T05:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/14638\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T05:15:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T05:15:07","slug":"two-shell-iicons-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/14638\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Shell: IIcons Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ambiguity is Two Shell\u2019s secret weapon, because it makes you go back, over and over, to figure out what the hell they\u2019re actually doing. The rush of \u201cDoom Culture\u201d is brain-scrambling. Shrill synths and curdled basslines hint at aggression, but the rigid kick and strangled vocal sound more like a deeply abstracted ballroom bitch track<\/a>. \u201c\u22c6\u208a\u02davision\u2727\u2027\u207a\u02d6\u22c6.\u201d is slip-n-slide garage, threatening to careen out of control as every sound is beveled and polished to a skeuomorphic sheen. The staggering \u201cDark Shadow\u201d sounds both brooding and cartoonish, invoking dubstep\u2019s dentist-drill basslines with equal parts menace and humor, while the vocal captures the icky sensation of accidentally chewing foil. These tracks are uncomfortable and uncanny\u2014never just one thing at any given time\u2014and you can hear in them the excitement that the duo seemed to radiate in every direction when it hit its stride around 2022.<\/p>\n

The rest of IIcons is more predictable. The potential hit, \u201cfinding my spirit,\u201d tackles a house track head on where Two Shell would usually zig-zag, with a vocal that feels strangely serious. It sounds so much like a Four Tet<\/a> song that it\u2019s already associated<\/a> with Four Tet, and it lacks the alien contours we look for in a Two Shell tune. Other tracks, like \u201ceXist\u201d and \u201cMoving Shadow,\u201d are perfectly fine, though they also sound like fairly standard riffs on UK dance music, without the weirdness or ugliness that makes the duo\u2019s best music stick jaggedly in your brain.<\/p>\n

Lucky for us, Two Shell remain absolutely sick producers. It often feels like they dreamed up new rare-earth elements and tried to map them in sound\u2014soft, hard, metallic, plasticine, jiggy, all at once\u2014and they\u2019re still pushing the needle leftward. They make underground dance music more pop-friendly, and the pop-friendly side of things more confrontational and silly. But IIcons also shows us that for all their\u2026 iconoclasm\u2026 Two Shell are heading down a well-trodden path. Their original tactic of taking the piss out of DJ culture doesn\u2019t make as much sense now that they\u2019re as popular and revered as the big-time selectors they once poked fun at. \u201cThe intention was never to troll,\u201d they say in that Instagram post. \u201cIt was to question what we are and whether it matters.”<\/p>\n

It might be a clich\u00e9, but what really matters is the music. Even if IIcons is not their best, it\u2019s still far more interesting than most of what gets played on the big stages Two Shell occupy these days. Hopefully the duo can rest up, find some new inspiration, and take off their disguises. Or just get some newer, crazier ones. They could open a restaurant, start a fake nation-state, make dance music for pets. They could also just be Jack and Patrick (or \u201cPete<\/a>\u201d), pumping out insidiously hooky dance tracks without hiding behind anything at all, learning from their mistakes and having fun making new ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ambiguity is Two Shell\u2019s secret weapon, because it makes you go back, over and over, to figure out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-14638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}