Cassette Review // Mickey O'Brien "Twin Flame - Reshuffled" (Hand'Solo Records)

 

https://handsolorecords.bandcamp.com/album/twin-flame-reshuffled

This cassette by Mickey O'Brien is the original EP, "Twin Flame", on the first side with a "Reshuffled" version of the EP by DJ Matto on Side B.   What is perhaps most intriguing about this though is how this is packaged.  The cassette itself is inside a normal case but that all lives inside of a box which feels (and looks) a lot like you're opening up a new tarot deck.  I find that interesting because that is what it is based upon, but I saw it right away because I am familiar with the tarot decks (I have some standard ones and a Dungeons & Dragons deck) but I always wonder what people who don't know about tarot might think. Does this look like cigarettes?

All of the artwork though just screams tarot and I even got the Five of Wands as a card added into all of this, which is fitting if you apply it to what this cassette is about lyrically.  Even the little card which comes inside and has a download code on it looks like a tarot card.  Every detail about how this is presented is just so perfect and I love it.  I feel like the old saying is "Don't judge a book by its cover" but if there was such a thing as a cassette store still, and I saw this cassette up for sale I would easily buy based just upon how it works.  When reviewing cassettes, do I need to start adding points for presentation?  I don't know, this release just makes me feel like maybe these physical releases should be about more than just the music.

And yet, at the same time, the music on "Twin Flame" is just so good.  No stranger to Mickey O'Brien, old school beats come out and I hear elements of artists such as Gym Class Heroes and Darko The Super.  It just feels so familiar, but that might also be simply because I've heard the sound of Mickey O'Brien before.  And within these six songs, more is accomplished than perhaps some others can do within twelve or fourteen tracks.  Just the way you're really getting the most out of every track here- you don't have to skip any.

Some of these songs can feel like you're just ready to sing along with lines like "Get in where you fit in or don't get in at all".  On the second song one the truest lyrics ever spoken says: "The game of love is like chess mixed with professional wrestling" .  That's something you could write entire pages about just on its own and yet it's only one set of lyrics from this entire EP.  I also am really big into the lines "I'm staying strong / Me and patience never got along" because I can relate with them a little bit too closely perhaps.

The third song, "The Perfect Storm", slows things down a little bit.  Big pianos like AJR starts up "Gabriel's Horn" and by the end of that you can hear a nice saxophone line.  I also like that within that song you'll hear the lyric "What's the scenario?" which will always remind me of my favorite rap song.  "11:11" hits like Nas and just hearing the way that Sarah Craig sings on "Sophia" is a thing of beauty in and of itself.   Hearing all of these songs, as they are, on the first side feels so special but then going and hearing them in another way on Side B just makes this one of the best cassettes I've ever not only seen in the tarot sense but heard in a musical sense.