The schizophrenic and successful pop of Twenty One Pilots
THE Twenty One Pilots they are more on track than ever, last spring they released their seventh album, “Clancy” (read the review here). However, the peak of the American duo, one of the most awarded albums of 2018, was reached with “Trench”the fifth album released on October 5 of that year. Here we remember him by offering you the reading of our review of the fifth chapter of the discography of Tyler Joseph And Josh Dun.
In 2015, Twenty One Pilots began to rack up mind-blowing numbers. “Blurryface” has sold 6.5 million copies. The single “Stressed out” has one and a half billion video views and almost one billion streams on digital platforms. In 2017 it won a Grammy for “Best Pop Duo/Group Performance” , and the concerts were sold out, everywhere. And everything is repeating itself: the Bologna date of February 19, 2019, announced in July, sold out in a flash most anticipated of the season. Not bad, for a band that few had previously heard of, a duo: the multi-instrumentalist Tyler Joseph and the drummer Josh Dun which already in the past launched groups that we would once have defined as “Alternative” (Paramore and Fall Out Boy) into the mainstream.
Yes, but what are Twenty One Pilots and what do they sound like? Are they alternative or “indie” or “mainstream”? For some time now, music has shown us that these labels have dissolved and make less and less sense: you can be successful with music and styles once considered niche, and great artists increasingly pursue ways and sounds far from pop or the mainstream.
Twenty One Pilots are perhaps the most striking demonstration of the dissolution of genres and labels. They do numbers not only from the mainstream, but from another era. Yet they like them for their musical diversity, because they make songs that are simultaneously accessible but “strange”, showing an angry and counter-current spirit. In short, they describe themselves as different and outside the mold of the mainstream. “Trench” continues on this path: if you are among those who loved the previous album, you will find everything that made the band popular. If you struggle to understand their success, perhaps you are out of target or you are accustomed to the old patterns of music.
“Trench” is a record in which the duo, as they have done in the past, mixes everything: pop, rock, rap, reggae, hip-hop, electronics with acoustic instruments.
So it can happen that a song like “Cut my lip” is based on an upbeat rhythm held by the piano, and spaces from dub inserts to synthetic keyboards and almost techno openings. It’s just one example among many: the distorted bass that opens the album, that of “Jumpsuit” is decidedly rock, and also the theme: discomfort, anger, the desire to escape: “I can’t believe how much I hate/Pressures of a new place roll my way/Jumpsuit, jumpsuit, cover me.” But you don’t have time to get used to the charge, before in the next song, “Levitate”, you switch to rap, and the theme of the album is clarified: “I am a vulture who feeds on pain”, sings Tyler Joseph – explaining the cover and using the recurring point of view of the songs, that of a character called Clancy, involved in escaping from a city called Dema, which is supposed to represent hardship and mental illness.
It is no coincidence that the duo’s music is defined by fans as “schizoid pop”. It’s a non-definition, as often happens to musical genre labels – but it works: because even in “Trench” Twenty One Pilots refuse to choose a precise path, and continue to follow dozens of them at the same time. The absence of a musical genre, in the end, is precisely the genre of the group itself. It is their advantage – what makes them “alternative” – and sometimes their limit.
A record and a band that fit perfectly into a context, like today’s where every listener can switch from one sound and genre to another in just a few seconds with nothing. Here it often happens within a single song: “Trench” works because the sound of the two is not only based on the quantity of stimuli, but also on quality: in the end, it manages to be a homogeneous record in its heterogeneity.
