DEADLY DUO IN SURREAL DEBUT LP
The British oddball teenagers put their freaky spin on pop with some oddly mixed results
While it is offbeat, there is also something wonderfully punky and nihilistic about the name Let’s Eat Grandma, the pairing of two multi-instrumentalist teenage girls hailing from Norwich, England. Long-time buddies Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton have been making what they refer to as “psychedelic sludge-pop” since they were 13. Like the name of their band, the girls’ live performances often lean towards bizarre and provocative, usually involving stage antics and childlike mannerisms — the combined aesthetic that scored them a record deal with indie label Transgressive.
Let’s Eat Grandma’s debut studio LP I, Gemini is a collection of 10 peculiar pop tracks that seems to draw eccentric influences from their predecessors such as Cocteau Twins, cocorosie and probably The Knife. However, unlike those artists, their self-styled quirkiness is meant as something of a comedic device. (Hollingworth commented in one of the interviews that “the whole album is almost taking the piss out of popular music” and that “so many things in it are just hilarious”).
Opener and lead single Deep Six Textbook is far from hilarious, though. Utterly eerie and atmospheric, the triphop-inspired cut contains outlandish lines sung in entrancing vocals such as “Let’s eat grandma in full colour” and “I bought the starfish one day/ Why would we be so stressed?” Frankly, a glockenspiel solo has never sounded so sinister.
Eat Shiitake Mushrooms follows suit with even more dreamlike glockenspiel and a bewildering blend of hip-hop and electronica elements. Underpinned by a blare of saxophone, Sax in the City is exactly what the title suggests. Chocolate Sludge Cake, on the other hand, is evocative of vintage pastoral English folk, featuring a two-and-a-half-minute recorder solo as the girls sing about baking different kinds of cake.
Rapunzel recalls an old nursery rhyme with twinkling piano coupled with a twisted narrative: “My cat is dead, my father hit me/ I ran away, I’m really hungry.” Welcome To The Treehouse Part I and Welcome To The Treehouse Part II couldn’t be more different — the former is a loose, introspective cut whereas the latter is anything but. The album concludes with Uke 6 Textbook, a stripped-down version of Deep Six Textbook with just their voices and ukulele. After all that dense and heady mix of sounds and ideas, the song is indeed a welcome relief.
Hollingworth might have said that many elements of this record are “hilarious” but we’re not so sure if that’s the right word. “Musically confounding” may be a more apt description of what’s going on with I, Gemini. There are moments of promising inventiveness that rebel against the norms of pop music, which is all well and good until that inventiveness is stretched so far it tethers on grating discordance. This is one of those albums you will have a hard time deciding whether to love or hate.