two lone swordsmen

I get way too excited to see my favorite electronic artists pop up in the new arrivals bin each day. What can I say? I’m a sucker for bleeps, bloops, clicks, cuts, and 4×4 rhythms. But what about when they go (gasp!) rock ‘n’ roll on us? Moby, Death in Vegas, Crystal Method? It ain’t a great track record.

So when Two Lone Swordsmen’s From the Double Gone Chapel came out a few years ago on Warp, I was nervous. Incredibly nervous, actually. Here was a group that had pretty much perfect various forms of electronic music and now they were going to tackle rawk?

Of course if I had thought about it for more than a second, I should’ve been excited. One-half of TLS? Andrew Weatherall (AKA the guy who helped make Primal Scream’s Screamadelica one of the best dance-rock fusions ever). And, of course, it worked out great.

Today sees the arrival on eMusic of Weatherall and co-conspirator Keith Tenniswood’s second chapter in their assault on post-punk, Wrong Meeting, and it’s a lot of the same: skuzzy rock riffs, deep hynopic basslines and Weatherall’s creepy crooning over top of it all. You can hear the traces of the duo’s dance music roots in the minimal songwriting (they favor repetition and mood-setting over immediacy and pop thrills), but this more often recalls people like Interpol (“Patient Saints”), Grinderman (“No Girl in My Plan,” “Evangeline”), or even Primal Scream (“Work at Night” gives me the same chills as XTRMNTR’s “Keep Your Dreams”) than anything else. Consider me a convert to this whole guitar thing…