   TWIN DANGER

You know that feeling when something just happens? - like, out of thin air. You’re minding your own business, doing your own thing, and bam, you’re transported to another world?

That’s pretty much how Twin Danger came about. That and some dirty jokes and a symbiotic approach to modern music. The kind you imagine seeping out the back doors of New York bars, or drifting along the halls of apartment blocks where flickering lamps cast long shadows.

Twin Danger is all of that. Two risk takers, one heart, and an appetite for the unknown.

Her name is Vanessa Bley. She’s young, tall, beautiful, and punky, with a stash of Clash records: “I was always the kid that couldn’t get over us being here - on earth,” she says. A guitarist, pianist, singer and songwriter, Vanessa lists Black Sabbath’s War Pigs and Tom Waits’ Alice among her favorites. And she’s got this voice. This fragile purity. This tenderness that fits like a glove and glows like sunset.

The Dangerman is Stuart Matthewman, and what he doesn’t know about making music isn’t worth knowing. Believe me. He plays guitar, but he played tenor sax for Vanessa and that’s what swung it.. Trying to pigeon hole his music is like trying to solve a Rubic Cube with vaseline. He’s the one stage right of Sade, who pens film soundtracks and listens to everything from Mahler to Dub. Oh, and I forgot, Stuart cycles. But a lot, and very fast.

Together Vanessa and Matthewman - going Dutch on playing, producing and songwriting duties - have created a new music that’s both analgesic and heartwarming, and super cool. Elemental, primal music to unwind to; to escape into, and fall in love to. Like that feeling you got when you first heard Chet Baker sing. Perfect for a Saturday night through Sunday morning…



The Twin Danger mood is quickly established with Matthewman’s distant, almost cinematic saxophone at the opening of Just Because. Across the tune’s romantic palette, underpinned by a propulsive guitar, Vanessa sets out her vocal store as clear and brittle as glass. At times almost speaking the lines.

Soon everyone will be talking about Coldest Kind Of Heart, a classic in the making if ever there was. Matthewman’s guitar, and a languid double bass, the setting for Vanessa’s yearning vocal enumerating the price of separation.

These tunes pitch Twin Danger into a twilight world, where thoughts and feelings are at their most intense. Yet for every When It Counts and In Many Ways, thoughtful meditations fusing jazz and the bluesy fringes of rock, there are moments of swing. Save It and Past Yet Untold, and I Love Loving You, each have an irresistible buoyancy. Spiced with layered brass sections that owe a debt of thanks to Gil Evans.

How Vanessa and Matthewman actually met is open to debate. Some say there’s an Estonian connection. The other theory is more prosaic: that they bumped into each other buying energy shots at a whole food store. Just Another 21st century New York story.

“We talked about music, and I said I’d written these chords with a dissonance that I liked, but that I didn’t know what to do with,” says Matthewman. “Next thing I know, a few hours later, she’s sent me back a finished song. It was as simple as that.”

Months later, with a bunch of tunes in the can, Vanessa is under a desk on 5th Avenue with Blue Note’s head of A&R (something about the acoustics are better down there) and everyone’s talking about albums and videos.

It’s the kind of stunt that happens when musicians who wear their hearts on their sleeves roll the dice.

Twin Danger - double the heartache, and twice the fun.


TWINDANGER.COM
