Music Review: The Jenkins Twins
New EP ‘The Dance Hall of My Mind’
Jenkins Twins EP album artwork (2021)
While I was doing background research on the Jenkins Twins to prepare for this review, I was struck by how many different music genres (Western swing, rock, folk, country, Americana) were mentioned to describe their style in reviews, as well as the number of artists they were compared to: Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Orville Peck, The Louvin Brothers, Colter Wall, The Civil Wars. The band’s press kit throws a few more names in the mix: Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, The Cactus Blossoms, Lord Huron, The Killers.
If I hadn’t already listened to The Dance Hall of My Mind, I might’ve been a tad concerned that the sheer number of references and influences meant their sound would be muddy, or derivative, or both. But as it was, I found myself nodding in recognition with everything I read. These Kentucky-based brothers have put together an EP that’s uniquely their own, yet could please fans of any of the acts and styles listed.
This glorious alchemy is the result of years of work to craft the sound they wanted, according to the duo, and I believe it. They’ve expertly isolated choice elements of music they love and then figured out how to weave it together just right. Sometimes a song will momentarily sound like pure Petty or spot-on Orbison, but more often the influences dovetail in surprising, spine-tingling ways—a sweet Everly Brothers-esque moment of close harmony punctuated by a Bakersfield-inspired electric guitar riff, for example.
Jenkins Twins, Is this a Dream music video still (2021)
But it all culminates in a sound that’s so incredibly cohesive, the four songs on this brief EP—clocking in at just 15 minutes—almost sound like movements in the same symphony. The first couple times I listened to it, they washed over me with a continuous yearning romanticism and my ear caught more similarities than differences. But on subsequent listens (and believe me, I could listen to it for hours), the different aspects of love portrayed in the songs revealed themselves.
The first track, “Wild at Heart,” captures the exhilaration of pursuing someone who is always slightly out of reach—in both the physical and emotional sense. “Follow me into the darkness, you said / So I follow you into the darkness,” it begins. But try as he might to hang on in a romance described as “the storm of the century,” the narrator never seems to catch up and, in the end, “It seems all these waves have been pullin’ me away.”
“Rose Red Dress,” by contrast, is a song of pure adoration. The artists have described it as playing on the timeless theme of “putting a loved one on a pedestal and showing them off in a moment of mixed love and pride.” The imagery is dreamlike, almost surreal at times: “Here she comes, spinnin’ like a carousel / Through a Marlboro light cigarette cloud.” The instrumentation alternately builds in excitement and pauses in breathless moments as if to savor the vision of the girl in her dress. The title of the EP appears in one line of the song—“In the dance hall of my mind we’re waltzing over time / Me and you forever written on the wall / Reflected off the mirror ball”—after which the brothers’ voices grow distant and echoey, enhancing the dreamy feeling.
Jenkins Twins. Photo courtesy of the artists (2021)
The bittersweet ache of being apart permeates the third song, “Is This a Dream.” The narrator, at sea (literally and figuratively) without his loved one, imagines her everywhere: “I think I see you in the stars above” they sing at one point; and later, “I could’ve sworn I heard your voice.” This song is the most explicit homage to the Everly Brothers; “Ring ring ring, bye bye love,” go the lyrics after a failed phone call. And like in the classic “All I Have to Do Is Dream'' when the Everly Brothers lament “Only trouble is, gee whiz, I’m dreamin’ my life away,” the Jenkins Twins have a similar moment: “My wishful whiskey dreams are killin’ me.”
The EP ends all too soon on the saddest track of the four, “Scarlett,” a classic tale of a relationship that has failed to deliver on its promises and has foundered. While the song is full of nostalgia for better days, the present situation is bleak: “You said you wanted out of this city / We had plans of movin’ far away from here / Now those days are fallin’ with the raindrops.” Nonetheless it ends on a moment of faint optimism, as the narrator clings to hope that their fate can still change: “I’ll pack our things, get up and go / Scarlett, just let me know.”
This is my first encounter with the music of the Jenkins Twins, but I hope it won’t be the last! For now, I’m just gonna hit the repeat button and get lost in these four songs for a good long while, thank you very much.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
