From the seemingly insurmountable external forces of industry silence and unattainable peaks to the troughs of internal crisis and loss, these Doomed Lovers have battled through adversity and narrowly avoided the crushing pitfalls of exclusion, addiction, and threats of violence, to emerge triumphant as their tenacity to the cause, as well as each other, became the updraft to the musical summit that they were destined for.
In a country that is deeply divided by religion and conservatism, but champions excess, self-gratification, and individualism, the separation between sanity and decay is a thinly veiled line that exists as a partition between chaos and control.
Add to this highly contentious and insidious social spectrum confessed Satanists Alexandra and Zachary James, and the results are markedly poignant. Take for example, the death threats and harassment that occurred from the Proud Boys toward the pair at the venues they played early on in their career. Trump’s America and the overt right-wing agenda that is being played out across the country and the wider world is the dog whistle that has dragged out every extremist with a bent from the rotten woodwork that the United States hides its disturbing and numerous skeletons behind.
The irony of emboldened bigots decrying the free speech and universal rights they champion, to attack the very fabric that supports them, not only serves to accentuate a point about the divided nation but ultimately how this musical duo is seen and treated.
Their love and admiration for their nation and the music it has founded has become a thorn in their side because of how they and their beliefs are treated. The American music that gave rise to Blues, Rock n Roll, Doo-Wop, and Rockabilly provides the basis of their own style and is inseparable from their essence. Providing the energy, flair, and feel-good nature of their music, the counterbalance of its underlying troubles that generate the music’s purpose and subject matter is the same for Twin Temple as it was for their contemporaries.
Railing against societal norms, conventions, misconceptions, and prejudice, the essential art form of music pushes back against prevailing headwinds and marches ever forward to the promised land of freedom, acceptance and self-expression. And to test those waters, a system of belief that lies on the fringes of tolerance, or understanding, will always be the gauge of where tolerance and disagreement rest.
It has been a long and testing road that Alexandra and Zachary have travelled along just to get to where they are today. Having fought so hard to firstly get their work heard and then to have it accepted has been the journey and not the destination. Taking years for their record God is Dead to be released after an industry-wide cone of silence was placed around it, by the time the album finally was hitting stores, like many an artist, as creatives and human beings, they had moved on. Life stops for no one, and things change, sometimes for the better and more often than not, it moves on in a more complicated way, zigging and zagging through the trials and tribulations which present themselves at almost every turn.
Doomed Lovers is the Los Angeles pairing’s latest album and one that is beset by tragedy and trying moments. As Alexandra explains, ‘We both were suffering with professional setbacks – for years we were stuck in a battle to release God is Dead. We made another album in that time we weren’t able to release. We need music in order to breathe and exist, and to have it taken away. A crushing depression settled over us both, which exacerbated addiction and health issues. It was a dark time, and we weren’t sure we’d ever emerge from it. We had many conversations about giving up, giving everything up. But this record was about healing, or attempting all these things by laying them bare on the record.” A brave and defiant outlook given how exacerbating the experience had been. And using the best-known method to combat such difficulties, passing these experiences through the cathartic filter of music was ultimately the best way to express those times, as Alexandra goes on to say,” Creating something beautiful out of the darkness allowed us catharsis. We just followed the muse; this was the record we needed to make at this time.” Yet the record contains some very deep roots and was born out of a tumultuous period of personal upheaval, as Alexandra gently explains,” I lost my Halmoni (Korean grandmother), who was like a mother to me and raised me. It devastated me. Shortly after, we also lost our beloved son (a pug) of 16 years. It felt like two of the most beautiful beings in my life were ripped away, like I had been amputated, and I didn’t even know who I was without them. We mourned our boy very heavily and were really stunned by the pain of it. We treated him as a child and were never apart from him; he even toured with us, was at the studio for every record we’ve made.” A difficult period made more difficult by the successive layering of untimely and unfortunate events.
Not to be defeated or completely dispirited by such incidents, the duo tenaciously held onto their beliefs and their art to deliver an album that lays to rest their struggles but celebrates them through song. An admirable quality and an aspect that adds to the genuine authenticity the couple have toward their life and music. That isn’t to say, however, their approach is harmonious and replete with synchronicity, as they candidly confess when describing their dynamism, and the strengths and weaknesses they each exchanged when fleshing out material and for this particular album, “We’ve been called fire and ice, or gas and brakes, because in some ways, I think we are very much a union of opposites, but at the same time, we share a deep core ethos and have so many musical loves.” Elaborating a little further and discussing the aesthetic and authenticity that they adhere to musically, Alexandra says, “To be honest, in many ways we both disrupt and revere authenticity in general. But at its core, we do love classic American Rock ‘n’ Roll – this project is very much a subversion and destruction of what’s come before, and at the same time it’s carrying the torch forward because we deeply love the music. It’s our moustache on the Mona Lisa; sometimes you must defile the canon in order to carry it forward.”
And by diving deeper into the style they harness and how they blend their own modern experiences with that of vintage Rock ‘n’ Roll for the betterment of both, through the overtly positive sound they champion, which often overlays the darker core lurking within, Alexandra explains the defining difference between the two worlds. “We love cognitive dissonance, like the opening scene of Blue Velvet that has Roy Orbison playing over a severed ear. We believe in transcending the binary; Baphomet is a sacred symbol within Satanism because it represents just that: part beast, part human, part man, part woman, as above, so below, and Baphomet is both those things and neither of those things. American Rock ‘n’ Roll can be quite dark as well, and we don’t feel we necessarily only champion a “positive” sound. We don’t have a methodology or a didactic intention; we just do what we please and what pleases us, and hopefully that inspires others to do the same.” Which is to say that it is neither a strict by-product of the genres Twin Temple tap into, or specifically a methodology they follow in order to make heavy topics more palatable, but rather that it is simply their approach and that, as a consequence of such, the ways of processing such matter are through the Yin and Yang they offer one another, which covers all bases.
There is an all-encompassing art form to Alexandra and Zachary’s work, be it the incredible outfits, theming, set design, photography and, of course, the music. So what are their creative processes and lines of thought when dissecting ideas, working out conceptual notions for extracting ideas from the cosmos and converting them into the tangible? “That is the Great Mystery, and a great pleasure, to take bits of fragments of inspiration from the ethers, and bring it down into the mundane world. We often just wonder at it all. We just remain open and receptive to what comes up. I still don’t know if we have a set process, or anything; sometimes it just strikes you like lightning, other times it’s a slow fire”, as Alexandra frankly admits. And perhaps the grandest test of this theory is in the here and now, and how they respond to the world around them, as there lies at the heart of America, a divided and traumatised soul, which feels more inflamed and conspicuous today than ever, but that same America that is the birthplace of their essential style and expressionism. How do the pair balance that dichotomy between the ills of their homeland and what it snatches with one hand and the platform it gives to create, on the other hand? Alexandra diplomatically explains by stating, “There will always be war and peace, hate and love. With all things, there is a shadow side. At the end of the day, we love American Rock ‘n’ Roll and culture, and we hope to bring people together under the auspices of free will, individualism, self-expression, self-empowerment, and non-apologetically marching to the beat of our own drums.” And to extend upon this further, she offers an insight about their motivations. “Recently, when we were a bit down, Glenn Danzig told us that when life knocks you down and off course, just get back up, focus on the art, write a song, get excited about a music video, design a t-shirt- just keep bringing the focus back to the art itself, and inspiration. It’s great advice. Always return to the art itself, that is the only thing that matters.” Sage advice, and it always pays to hear what old heads have to say, but equally, Alexandra stumps up some wise words of her own when talking about the significance music has to her, her life and her relationship with Zachary, “Personally, music is the thing that consumes our passions; it’s sacred and beautiful, and in a Bukowski like sense, it’s almost an unhealthy compulsion. But at the end of the day, we feel music, unlike anything else on this forsaken earth, brings beauty and pleasure to us, and hopefully others, and brings people together, better than anything else.”
What more needs to be said other than it would be nice if more people listened to Satanists if this is how they view the world and those living in it. A group and belief system which, at face value, would not seem to be the voice of reason or compassion, yet what Alexandra and Zachary subscribe to is a world where individuals are truly free, and music is a universal gift that excludes no one, and offers something to every colour, class and creed, that if embraced, gives back eternally.
