Many’s the time in this game that reaching for the easy comparisons is not only well…easy, but also works best in drawing the right ties together in the reader’s mind.
Sure you could say it’s lazy, but if we were to state that Let’s Eat Grandma have direct lineage back to Kate Bush, Bjork, Patti Smith, No Wave, or even Nu-folk, you’d kind of know what we mean, right?
Wrong. Or at least we would be. For one thing, Let’s East Grandma is actually two seventeen year old girls from Norwich who have an aura of the twins which featured in The Shining almost grown up, but equally Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth claim to never have heard of any of the artists responsible for the so-called primal elements of their music. Live, they employ all manner of multi-instrumental kernels – accordion, xylophone, drum machines – giving the impression of some kind of orchestra of the damned, all Macbethian Bruja, cutting across moods and textures like Wuthering Heights on a bad kitten trip.
There’s obvious symbolism to the album’s title as well, more than a hint of multiple personality, or two people acting as conjoined in both body and mind, but the good news is that not far beneath these contrivances something quite interesting is taking place musically, as well you suspect a healthy dose of teenage piss taking.
How you feel about this heavily Gothic potpourri will depend on what setting your weird-o-meter is calibrated to. On ‘Sleep Song‘ the two take an off kilter shanty and drench their vocals with febrile distortion; the effect is like waking up on a pirate ship and wanting to walk the plank – appropriately it ends with a scream. Odd? Yes. But like ‘Rapunzel‘, it’s compelling, slightly disorientated, the cheesy grand piano opening to the latter adding a filmic edge to a song which is in fact a post-modern fairytale of isolation, little madness and parallels between mythic places bathed in Kawaii shtick and the elusive “real life”.
It’s a remarkable depth to be operating in, but not one the pair always feel the need to swim down to, the closer ‘Uke 6 Textbook‘ – a four string acoustic rendering of its grown up version ‘Deep 6 Textbook‘ – is innocent and unlayered, lacking any hint of pretence. The same admittedly can’t be said of the doppelgänger, a hazy, sunshine flecked stream of unconsciousness that barely manages to escape from its own sacred torpor, a trip-hoppy postcard from down the rabbithole.
Who knows what inputs are making teenagers from the middle of nowhere come up with this stuff so beyond their years, but at times it’s vital, innocent – ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms‘ Nostferatu opening two and a half minutes – then scattily fun, as it swerves into cod-rap naffness, sounding uncannily like two girls bogling into their hairbrushes to The Spice Girls.
Whilst the notion of Girl Power would, you guess, cause fits of giggles to young women raised in the vicious concentric circles of twenty first century existence, a real sense of freedom – creative, personal, perspective – dominates ‘I, Gemini‘ from first minute to last. ‘Sax In’ The City‘s sun on the rocks lullaby is it at its most orthodox, but both parts of ‘Welcome To The Treehouse‘ are the Aquarian gems, part tribal, mostly intricate pop, a fusion of all these Frankenstein’s parts to make a fascinating sum.
It feels like the greater the balance of our acquired knowledge becomes, the more the mystique of the arts is reduced, as if every flick of the brush or chord change is the result of some decipherable neuro-chemical process science and rationality can deconstruct. ‘I, Gemini’ is a record that says the opposite, that everything means nothing, that beliefs and prejudices are only as strong as their weakest link.
Talk of spells and superstition may be wrong, but it’s still thrilling to realise that even in the era of being strangled by logic, enchantment is still possible.
