MUSIC

Let’s Eat Grandma

Stereo, Glasgow

JJJ

The seemingly mordant name is a joke about the importance of comma placement – already it is clear that multi-instrumentalists Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingsworth are not your average teen pop duo. Friends since the age of four, the girls were encouraged to explore and play – the result is an off-kilter set of songs about shiitake mushrooms and the Rapunzel myth rooted in pop music but speckled with the classical music on which they grew up.

Now in their late teens but looking much younger, they projected an intriguing blend of innocence and eccentricity, incorporating clapping games and bedroom dancing into a performance which was otherwise aloof – the whispered confabs and skipping across the front of the stage with no acknowledgement of the audience only adding to the slightly awkward and unsettling atmosphere.

This, it transpired, was a suitable state in which to encounter their eerie electro pop, sung in unvarnished voices either in unison or using counterpoint melodies. This was teen dream pop with a nightmare twist, and a wholly unexpected use of soulful saxophone and recorder in addition to their favoured sombre piano chords, synthesizer stabs and occasional resonant guitar parts.

For much of the set, the

duo were backed by a drummer but effectively these girls were lost in their own world, a secluded state which makes Lorde seem light-hearted in comparison. Tracks from forthcoming album I’m All Ears suggested a degree of conventionality creeping in – but let’s hope instead that Let’s Eat Grandma stay weird.

FIONA SHEPHERD