Life-altering events are addressed on the new Let’s Eat Grandma album.
Putting humans on a pedestal is always a risky business for everyone involved.
Musicians can short circuit that sense of detachment with social media and everything else, but access and understanding are two completely different things, especially when those concerned aren’t quite your standard pop star clones.
Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth were teenagers when, as Let’s Eat Grandma, they released two of the last decade’s most refreshingly inventive albums in 2016’s I, Gemini and its follow-up I’m All Ears.
Sales were modest, but more than once they were mentioned in the same breath as Kate Bush and expectations for the future were high. Then, in amongst the always on world of celebrity, they disappeared.
Of course, there were reasons. Inseparable since the age of four, Walton and Hollingworth had already sensed a fraying of their previously telepathic bond as the former moved from their hometown of Norwich to London, whilst her friend had begun a relationship with local musician Billy Clayton.
Walton’s sojourn ended unhappily after a miserable burnout, but in the meantime Hollingworth was facing a more profound emotional upheaval, with Clayton battling an aggressive form of bone cancer known as Ewing’s sarcoma, a disease which ultimately claimed his life in early 2019.
The pair’s openness in public around the chain of events has been a testament to their characters, even when it would’ve been perfectly understandable if Two Ribbons had been filled with overtones of angry resignation.
It took shape as, for the first time, they wrote separately, and as this pattern developed they began to see the process as a series of letters to each other, an antiquated means of communication that better suited the changing contours of their friendship.
If that suggests an album that would shuttle between styles as emotions, pleasingly the opposite applies, the bubbling EDM of opener Happy New Year with lyrics full of sisterly olive branches: ‘There’s no onе else who gets mе quite like you…and nothing that was broken can touch how much I care for you.’
This contrast – lyrical rumination but upbeat, almost club ready music – is less hard to accept in practice than in theory. The words to Levitation describe a breakdown Walton experienced, a memory evoked with, ‘Shooting stars in your direction/As I’m losing grip on my reflection’, confessions played to the kind of immaculately garnished pop worthy of Charli XCX.
This juxtaposition is even more acute on Watching You Go, which explores Hollingworth’s anger and powerlessness to affect the circumstances around Clayton’s death. In tandem, the brief instrumental In The Cemetery references the time she spent in graveyards subsequently coming to terms with it, an unconventional method of dealing which to her simply felt right.
To add to the upheaval Walton, having finished a long-term relationship, also found in herself the desire to explore her recently acknowledged bisexuality, new beginnings explored here via the sparkling Hall Of Mirrors.
The titular closing track brings everything back to where it all began, a profound mutual constancy which should never fail, but may. Never succumbing to melodrama, the tender guitar-led ballad never commits the sin of offering closure, simply asking questions about questions.
Growth is hard for most people, a non-linear process with forward and reverse gears. Two Ribbons finds Hollingworth and Walton setting it to music, songwriters with an appetite for bringing their audience along as therapy.
Its inevitable imperfections should be worn like a medal.
