Sophomore albums are always an intriguing milestone for musicians and bands because they kind of serve notice as to how they react to people’s reception of their work (and that reaction ranges from full on ignoring critics and listeners alike and following their own directions to modifying and mass alterations to style and sound depending on what grabbed people’s ears the first time out of the gate); in any case, Eagle Twin’s sophomore effort is the devastating The Feather Tipped The Serpent’s Scale which shows the duo moving more deeply into the crushing dense musical arrangements and trance inducing chant like vocals of their debut that showed an already unique path being forged.
One truth becomes abundantly clear while listening to this album obsessively and that is how wonderfully thick the guitars are in meshing with bombast of the drums, and while Eagle Twin may be just a two –piece band, The Feather Tipped The Serpent’s Scale sounds thicker and more full than a great number of larger bands; but that thick sound does not drag down the great riffs that Gentry Densley churns out minute to minute and in some ways boils the album down to an audible affinity to old blues records, and the drumming of Tyler Smith matches the guitars so very well in both skill and taste. Try not to bang your head along with “Ballad Of Job Cain Part 1” as Eagle Twin deftly lumbers over your ear drums with tasty riff after tasty riff (that stop about mid song and the way these guys pull it off is just awesome) while the strained vocals add the perfect touch to the song, but this song is literally just the tip of the iceberg as the band mixes tempos (check out the gloriously slow crawl of “Lorca (Adam)” and “Snake Hymn” which at times both bring to mind Cathedral circa Forest of Equilibrium, which is a monster compliment from me) and crushing amounts of volume to consistently pummel your body and rattle your brain inside your skull; and there is not one bad song to kill the momentum, just more and more great blues-y doom that has more soul and feeling than some traditional blues players can muster up on their records.
The Feather Tipped The Serpent’s Scale exceeds all the lofty expectations that I had for the album prior to its release in leaps and bounds with its powerfully crushing sound and bountiful riffs while connecting with me in a way that their previous album did not, and considering how much that I enjoyed that first album, this is a testament to just how excellent The Feather Tipped The Serpent’s Scale is and how much Eagle Twin progressed in their own little musical universe; flat out a great record and one that needs to be heard.
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