CD Reviews

Watson Twins

Southern Manners | www.thewatsontwins.com

By MIKAEL WOOD | October 2, 2006

3.0 Stars

The Watson Twins are Chandra and Leigh, two Kentucky-raised, LA-based sisters who’ve spent the past year doing a heck of a job singing back-up in Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis’s country-pop solo act. (Before that they played in the LA indie band Slydell.) Southern Manners, a self-released eight-song EP, is their own thing, and it plays like a sweet end-of-summer breeze: strummed acoustic guitars overlaid with their intertwined singing, which refreshes all kinds of overworked ideas about the ability of siblings to harmonize. As tunes go, Lewis is the bigger talent; most of this stuff exits your consciousness as soon as it’s over. (An exception is the churchy, organ-fueled title track, which imagines what the Band would’ve sounded like as ladies.) But the Watsons have good ideas about how to enliven their familiar material. Expect their writing to catch up soon.

Watson Twins + Jenny Lewis | Berklee Performance Center, 136 Mass Ave, Boston | October 9 | 617.228.6000

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