The Wiyos - Twist (2012)

Tracklist

01. Yellow Lines
02. Jolly Roger
03. Scarecrow 1
04. Tinman
05. Mary
06. Mama
07. Poppy Fields
08. Farewell Weather Bird
09. Scarecrow 2
10. Sally May
11. Penny Arcade
12. The Lion
13. Mother Witch
14. Home (the Ballad)

Twist is undoubtedly The Wiyos' strongest and boldest work to date. It is an original song cycle loosely based on L. Frank Baums' The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Campbell's, The Hero’s Journey. The band's central writers Michael Farkas and Teddy Weber have taken their nine years of touring roots festivals, vaudeville shows, coffee houses, big city clubs, backwoods bars, theatres, backyard parties, performing arts centers, barn dances, churches, art centers and even stadiums and mashed it all together with their uncanny knack for merging and fusing numerous American musical styles.

"Simultaneously tear-jerking and disturbing, this new material invokes McCartney at his most melancholy, Lennon at his most acid-inflected, and Oz in all of its most surreal, technicolour glory." (Backroadsmusic.co.uk)

"The disc’s 14 tracks offer dreamlike, impressionistic, wryly funny snapshots rendered via the Wiyos’ high-energy cabaret/blues rock. Recorded over the course of a year, Twist unravels, track by track, like a surreal Americana opus—Big Pink meets Pink Floyd."(Chronogram Magazine, NY)

"By turns it’s funny, disturbing, rousing and bouncy and all the time it’s irresistible.... the band don’t just produce an updated soundtrack but add lots of their own ideas while never losing sight of the story. Occasionally it even sounds a bit Lennon/McCartney, circa the Summer of Love. Constantly surprising, always interesting, this album does indeed give the Oz story a whole new, ahem, twist."

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