.jpg "BOTH CYLINDERS: Fire away.")
Call him Jimmy Walls. “Stripped-down band, stripped-down name,” says the former Jim Wallerstein, most recently of Vacationland, a band that burned brightly and quickly from 2002 through 2004, before their drummer fell in love with Cerberus Shoal and the band kind of fell apart. In some ways, Walls’s new two-piece, Twin Engines, isn’t all that different from the four-man glam outfit that was Vacationland. Back then, Walls shared frontman duties with Shawn Saindon. Now, he shares with Bobbie Rae.
Even though Rae’s a drummer.
“It’s just the two of us,” says Walls. “We just set up side by side on stage, and it’s just like two front guys and one happens to play drums and one happens to play guitar. He’ll sing one, I’ll sing one. We’ll sing one together. He might rap a bit. Whatever works.”
Portland scenesters can get their first look at it next weekend at the Big Easy. Of course, New York live-music fans have been checking out Twin Engines for about six months now, at clubs like the Continental. That’s the other wrinkle in the band: Rae lives in New York City, Walls here in Portland.
“You get used to it,” says Walls. “The drive’s not so bad. Jet Blue is going to make things a lot easier.” But it’s pretty safe to say that when a new airline coming to town is a good thing for your fledgling band, you’re outside of the norm.
“It sounds wacky,” says Walls, “but it all works. I love New York, but I love it here, too.” He says the Portland-New York dichotomy informs the music, too, a combination of what he calls New York grit and New England magic. It’s the sort of combination perfected by Walls’s wife, Bebe Buell, actually, so it should come as no surprise that Walls has committed himself to staying up here in the Pine Tree State.
You can hear it in the music, too. Twin Engines has yet to release material, but they recently went into the studio with Boston scene legend David Minehan of the Neighborhoods (you might hear him called “Sir David,” he’s been around so long). They’ve got four songs up on their MySpace page and though Walls cautions they’re just demos, you can get a good feel for the amount of sound and energy Walls and Rae can produce — without any studio trickery.
“Wherever” is the tune they’re playing on WCCY. Walls has got that British punk accent working, sneering the verse before entering into an unexpectedly catchy chorus: “Where can I find you now?/ Where’s your town” — it sounds better than it looks on paper. Walls lays on the staccato guitar chords, with something of a Neighborhoods sound actually, before entering a very indie rock bridge, a wailing sort of off-key plaint.
On “Right Now” Walls does more of the Axl Rose voice-strain that you’d hear in Vacationland. You also hear more pairings of Walls’s and Rae’s voices, Rae’s timbre providing ballast for Walls’s soaring tenor. With “Say What You Want,” the juxtaposition is even more startling, Walls’s punkish vocals followed by Rae’s rap, lending a Fishbone feel. As you might expect, this two-piece is more White Stripes than Mates of State, and it does have that franticness that makes the Stripes so thrilling, like everything could just totally fall apart at any time.
