{"id":338191,"date":"2026-07-13T05:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T05:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/338191\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T05:53:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T05:53:11","slug":"twisted-teens-florida-water-blues-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/338191\/","title":{"rendered":"Twisted Teens: Florida Water Blues Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Twisted Teens<\/a> broke through with their second album, Blame the Clown<\/a>, only five months ago, the New Orleans duo\u2019s southern-fried mix of garage rock, early punk, rockabilly, and country screamed both \u201cFirst thought is absolutely best thought\u201d and \u201cWait until I show you what else I can do.\u201d But if their last album presented the band at their most gleeful and cocky, ready to call the world as they saw it, then Florida Water Blues takes place the morning after: a touch more vulnerable now that the liquid courage has subsided and the hangover is setting in. Blame the Clown may be where the makeup was first put on, but Florida Water Blues is where the tears start to show.<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that Twisted Teens have suddenly upended their approach. On the surface, there\u2019s very little that separates Florida Water Blues from Blame the Clown, which isn\u2019t a bad thing at all. The band still churns out perfectly bite-sized garage rock nuggets that could compete with Jay Reatard<\/a> at his heyday, with the likes of \u201cTop of the World Hwy No. 2\u201d and opener \u201cWhy Did You Miss It?\u201d destined to become singalongs at their live shows. Caspian Hollywell still sings like he\u2019s trying to exorcise his gnarled vocal chords even further, attempting to dislodge the decades of cigarette smoke and whiskey shots that have stained his throat. The riffs he churns out are still rough and fuzzy and hit like a baseball bat, serving as the foundation of every song; RJ Santos\u2019 steel guitar playing is the constantly hovering staccato accent, a piercing counterpoint or sharp accompaniment to the bluntness at play. The drum machine seems to have been boosted to honorary third member, or at least Hollywell and Santos are having more fun programming it. Cranking its volume into the red as heavily as its living cohorts, they let it burst in to restart their songs, its rickety and lopsided beats creating a spontaneity that breaks up their well-honed formula.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

A melancholy has seeped into the band\u2019s songwriting, and this is what gives Florida Water Blues its color. Twisted Teens\u2019 lyrics reflect a hard-fought, blue collar existence, but tracks like Blame the Clown\u2019s \u201cNot Real\u201d balanced their tough lessons with dogged perseverance (and a chorus you could drunkenly yell along to). On Florida Water Blues, every character seems to be just scraping by. The stripper in \u201cDancer\u201d is miserable about her clientele, her job, and the inability to escape. The band may love their Louisiana home, but on \u201cSwamp,\u201d it\u2019s still \u201cin the crotch of America\u201d and \u201csmells like ket and two-piece chicken.\u201d And no matter how raucous \u201cHand Me a Cigarette\u201d may get, the quiet defeat at its core is obvious from the moment its fingerpicked intro starts. The band has pushed their country influences a little closer to the front this time: Santos frequently deploys wilting slide moves that would break a cowboy\u2019s heart, and Hollywell is a little more willing to let his guitar talk without distortion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Twisted Teens broke through with their second album, Blame the Clown, only five months ago, the New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[126885,28,30,29,5369],"class_list":["post-338191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-albums","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}