Minimal, warm,the yearning pop music of the Durham twins is your new favourite thing. FFO Young Marble Giants, Yo La Tengo, The Sundays. Picture That is the work of twins Shawn and Allison Durham from St. Louis, who’ve created their world out of minimal instrumentation and structure and maximal feeling. Twin sisters who play together with a simple chemistry that congeals into something really special. Mini album “Strum” takes the bare bones of 90s American indie music and injects a terse UK post punk minimalism to end up with something utterly winnable, in the vein of Yo La Tengo boiled down to the message, each song is short, delivers the emotional punch and pull it needs to and then disappears, begging an instant replay. Undercover Letters, with its Wire-style guitar palm muted chord progression and practice room drum patterns, terse as you like, framing the vocal beautifully. The darkly sparkling guitar dresses the melancholy vocal codas before Try’s Yo La Tengo shuffle and fuzzy guitar splits open the atmosphere for the gorgeous vocal “being around you’s easy, no need to try..” The simple descending vocal line at the break feels like if Sarah Records was based in the midwest of USA in the late 80s. The louche stomp of Infinity feels a little more like a missive from the Flying Nunnery, a bullet at a minute and half of naive loveliness. Time Away feels half asleep in that just woke up sad way, delicious feeling, under the covers, a duvet of the day’s expectation waiting to be shrugged off. Tracks like Magnolia feel a little more like 80s post-hardcore groups like Mission of Burma – bear with me – if all the machismo rendered in volume had been turned off and instead you have this holding pattern, pulled back, waiting to jump. The simplicity and straight aheadiness of every moment of this record is so addictive and perfect. It might be short but as you’ll want to play it again and again it won’t matter.
