Artist: Tesla
Label: Scarlet Records
Release: 2011
Duration: 65:21
Rating: 5/5
“Twisted Wires And The Acoustic Sessions” is a fantastic piece of work that every Tesla fan simply has to add to their Tesla collection, pronto. It’s a sort of tribute to the live “unplugged” album “Five Man Acoustical Jam”, released two decades ago, which set off a whole wave of eager imitation all over the planet. If anyone still remembers, in the first half of the nineties “unplugged” concert broadcasts on MTV were raining down.
Tesla have always been famous for masterfully blending natural sonic collages with the hell-raising rock power generated by electric current. The band landed in a rather nasty spot in this new era, as a year ago their studio in San Francisco burned to the ground, throwing a bit of a wrench into the band’s working rhythm. Still, Tesla are way too tough and seasoned a bunch to let something like that paralyze them and kill their drive to create and to do what they love most. Playing and performing their own music! So last year we got a new live album, and this year the band broke its seeming hibernation with a new acoustic release. It’s welcome also because it more than successfully bridges the longer stretch that will evidently pass before the band’s next studio album. The last one, “Forever More”, came out back in 2008.
Tesla sprinkled two brand-new songs on this release too, 2nd Street and Better Off Without You. They fit perfectly with the rest of the material, and both prove that the band’s inspiration is nowhere near running dry in the more mature phase of their prolific career. In their acoustic original form, they shamelessly reach a level of great flexibility in the arrangements, leaving loads of room for an electric upgrade and a possible spot on the band’s future studio album.
This time around Tesla aren’t chasing hits. They’re unburdened by how “Twisted Wires” will sell. And that’s an extra plus on an otherwise excellent release. It lines up lesser-known classics from the band, giving a bit more attention to the unjustly overlooked “Bust A Nut” album (Shine Away, A Lot To Loose), adds Caught In A Dream alongside the title track from the album “Into The Now”, next to the already standout Tesla sweeties Song And Emotion, Changes, Edison’s Medicine.
Another interesting thing is that Tesla manage to pour their electric arrangements into acoustic ones with pinpoint precision. You get that right from the opener Into The Now, which literally stuns with how close it is to the electric original, as does its sibling from the same album, Caight In A Dream, even though we’re talking about strictly acoustic instrumentation.
What You Give has a guitar slide that, in its warped sonic rhetoric, gives you the real feeling that a banjo has been added to one of the guitars in the backing. Truly some string-bending. You run into something similar in the performance of Edison’s Medicine. Interestingly, the band didn’t forget to bring in a theremin here, to get closer to the mood of the electric original. Again, the structure of some songs in their original versions offers tons of room for improvisation and embellishments that upgrade the character of the versions now poured into acoustic form. One such fascination is Hang Tough, which steers a golden middle course between staying faithfully close to the original and having the guitarists (Dave Rude / Frank Hannon) deftly add, wherever they find room for it (especially in the middle instrumental section), some excellent acoustic touches that stir up liveliness, deepen the dramatic moment and masterfully keep the mood rolling dynamically between the album’s tracks.
The album really lets Keith’s vocal sense of sophisticated interpretation shine. Keith is excellent, and he handles every situation brilliantly. He can be venomously raspy, like the cheekiest brat in the solar system (Into The Now), or unwaveringly fragile and vulnerable, as on the new Better Off Without Without You, What You Give, or Song And Emotion. Even more intensely highlighted is Jeff’s ability to glide skillfully between purely melodic vocal delivery, to which he adds a greater or lesser dose of throatiness (A Lot To Lose, Song And Emotion). In Changes, Keith takes the verses almost in falsetto. In these stripped-bare acoustic versions, Jeff Keith is precisely the all-the-more important building block for stringing together a whole range of moods. And not to spit in my own soup, let me hint that the album isn’t entirely acoustic: the middle instrumental section of the excellent new Better Off Without You, which sounds in the spirit of classic golden-era Tesla songs, escapes into an electric outfit.
The album also surprisingly includes the song I Love You, originally by Climax Blues Band. It’s the first song the band recorded at all after reuniting in 2000, when they got back together in the studio after six years of silence. Clearly it holds special memories for them.
One more thing needs pointing out. The first six songs were recorded recently with the current lineup. The other six were recorded in 2005 with original guitarist Tommy Skeoch in the lineup. The difference is felt most in the sound production. The new songs come across as considerably more direct, stripped down, even more alive, played “less precisely” than the versions recorded with Skeoch in the lineup, though otherwise the guitar work in both lineups’ versions is on equal footing, with not a hint of a quality wobble. It’s up to you to decide for yourself which production sound you like better on this album. The new lineup or the old one. On the older versions the band took more care to keep the sound under control, and the backing vocal harmonies fit more cohesively with Jeff Keith’s basic vocal stance. String arrangements were also added, along with an almost Gershwin-esque piano intro in the song Changes (with Skeoch in the lineup), which is why that song, next to superior gems like Shine Away and Song And Emotion, stands out especially as the album’s dramatic peak.
“Twisted Wires And The Acoustic Sessions” is truly manna for every Tesla fan. It’s a manifesto of extraordinary studio looseness and of this band’s extraordinary expressive power, embodying the primal knack for fascinatingly transforming electric portraits of their own authorship into a sensually deepened acoustic landscape. Within the acoustic manner, Tesla hit the emotions far harder and more intensely. This is a product that embodies great wisdom, skill and know-how. With it, Tesla once again flirted with the roots their music comes from. They played full of enthusiasm and a hunger to prove themselves, like teenagers scraping together piles of dollars for their first electric instruments, and that’s exactly where they returned with “Twisted Wires”. Except that today these guys are incomparably better interpreters.
Lineup
Jeff Keith – vocals
Frank Hannon – guitar, piano, theremin
Dave Rude (tracks 1 to 6) – guitar, backing vocals
Tommy Skeoch (tracks 7 to 12) – guitar, backing vocals
Brian Wheat – bass guitar, backing vocals
Troy Luccketta – drums, percussion
Production
Tesla
Tracklist
01. Into The Now (4:26)
02. Hang Tough (4:42)
03. 2nd Street (4:40)
04. Edisons Medicine (5:50)
05. What You Give (7:28)
06. Better Off Without You (4:24)
07. Shine Away (7:06)
08. I Love You (4:04)
09. Changes (6:05)
10. A Lot To Lose (5:21)
11. Caught In A Dream (4:55)
12. Song And Emotion (6:20)
