Released: 1990
Tracks: Amnesty; It’s No Secret; Heaven Sent; While My Hair Grows Long; 1000 Roses; Anastarsia; Always Give Your Love Away; Nicotine Queen; Let Me; Blue; Big Stick
Best track: Big Stick, Always Give Your Love Away or It’s No Secret
Track to skip: Anastarsia is only decent
For this review I’m working from a copy with a lot of hiss – it’s probably 4 or 5 generations deep. Maybe one day we’ll get some pristine copies of this Twang material (come on, Davíd, I know you have it somewhere), but in the meantime this is all I have to work from. To be honest, it’s not too bad. Yeah, there’s a lot of hiss, but it’s still very listenable and the quality of the songs still comes through. It’s pretty impressive that in the span of about a year, Twang released 3 full albums and the “best of”, Me So Twangy. Contrary to what I thought in the review for
Twanger, It’s a Twang Thang is definitely the 2nd Twang album and Twanger was the 3rd. So what, I got it wrong. This album definitely continues the fun and excellent songwriting from the first album. I guess they hadn’t earned too much money by this point, because it still sounds like everyone is playing in the same room together. Who knows, it might’ve even been recorded in someone’s bedroom. I think the closeness of the band works in the album’s favor, because Twang wasn’t a band that thrived on big production. For much of their career it was just acoustic guitar, upright bass & minimal percussion. This album reflects that ethos and brings it right up to the front.
For me the songs from this album and the first one are kind of interchangeable. The songs are all more or less consistently good and a handful of these are outright Twang classics. Amnesty, Always Give Your Love Away, Nicotine Queen, Let Me & Big Stick still get great reactions from audiences at Twang and solo Davíd Garza shows. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see that Big Stick is repeated here from the first album. I don’t know why, but I’m glad they included it here as it’s a far superior version. They dropped the rap bit from the front of the song and play it more up-tempo. The version here is great, possibly the best song on the album. Let Me gets its introduction here and it’s still one of Davíd’s best slow songs. He even re-recorded it for his Overdub album in 2001. I love the extra musical bit at the end of this version and also Jeff “El Jefe” Haley’s bass on this. Truthfully, he’s excellent on this whole disc. His upright just booms throughout. It’s No Secret is probably my favorite contribution from him. His playing is fantastic on that song. It’s No Secret is one that I sometimes forget about, but listening to it here was a great experience. Stellar version of it on this album. The only “kinda” misstep on this album is Anastarsia. It’s a decent song, but it doesn’t come close to even the average tracks here. I usually find myself skipping it. Other than that, though, everything’s great on here.
I really view this as a continuation of the first album. This one is solid all the way through and, yeah, it’s at roughly the same quality as If I Loved You, Would You Ache. Both are completely essential if you’re into Davíd Garza’s early material. It’s a Twang Thang has more of the classics, though, so it’s going to get a slight bump in the ratings department.
Rating: 91
June 10, 2009, 
10:10 pm
Write a comment