Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Florida, George Lewis Jr. didn’t really “become” Twin Shadow until he moved to Brooklyn, so the back-to-roots or starting-over implication in the title of Twin Shadow, the fifth album he’s released under that moniker, is enigmatic: the roots stretch across a coastline and over a strait.
More important, the roots reach back to the funk, soul, and island styles that inspired him to make his own music. He even brings out the saxophone, the first instrument he learned to play, and employs it to affectionate effect alongside his usual assortment of guitars and keyboards.
Lewis obviously takes comfort from sounds he’s loved since long before the first Twin Shadow album, Forget, came out in 2010. And he relaxes into the opening track, “Alemania” (the Spanish word for Germany), with pleasantly strummed acoustic guitar, a swaying beat, and a creamily told story of a compressed love affair in Hamburg.
Backing vocals from Kadhja Bonet, a blossoming queen of psychedelic soul, emphasize how easily Lewis adjusts his gifted voice to fit pacing and genres that fans of Lenny Kravitz and Ben Harper should appreciate.
Lewis is looser and more playful than either of those gentlemen, whether reconfiguring Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” organ tone for the pleadingly sensual “Sugarcane,” riding a Chic-esque bassline toward pre-disco days in “Is There Any Love,” or distorting vocals and synths into the Prince-echoing ballad “Modern Man.”
If the comfort and affection don’t hinder Lewis’s surprising diversity—the reggae beat of “Lonestar” feels inevitable, but the doo-wop electro-pop of “Brown Sugar” does not—they do make Twin Shadow less emotionally concentrated than its LP predecessors. But they also make Lewis and his Shadow more immediately accessible. His roots are less exotic than his fruits.
