For their second album, Reading's Heart Throbs have a revised lineup (singer Rose Carlotti's bass-playing sister Rachael DeFreitas is out, replaced by Colleen Brown), found another poetic term for female genitalia for the album title, a new U.S. label (A&M in place of Elektra), a different production style (the band produced the album themselves after the death of Martin Hannett, who'd handled the debut), and a much cleaner, more direct sound. Dreamier and more hazy than noisy, Jubilee Twist is more immediately accessible than the somewhat more forbidding Cleopatra Grip, but it unfortunately doesn't stick in the listener's head the way the debut did. With the exception of the glorious "Tiny Feet" (probably the best thing the Heart Throbs ever did) and its hypnotic reprise at the end of the album, few of the songs have the mysterious beauty of earlier tracks like "Tossed Away." The opaque "The Girl Became the Stairs" comes close, but Carlotti's overly dramatic spoken interlude is a little over the top. Nevertheless, the surface pleasures of this luxurious album are almost enough to make up for the occasionally weak songwriting.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo