Released:
Rating:
Weird but wonderful.
‘Album’ of ‘the Week’
Label: Transgressive
Released: June 17th 2016
Rating: ★★★★
Singing songs they wrote when they were just thirteen, Let’s Eat Grandma’s music is rooted in childlike imagination. Jumping between styles as if it were as happenstance as dropping a hat, the duo thread together sounds and ideas that probably should never touch. Yet somehow, it works a treat. ‘I, Gemini’ is wide eyed wonder given form, placing magic in mundanity and twisting the sensational into the sinister.
“Tell me something interesting,” the pair entice, singing amidst enchanting harmonicas and daydreaming vocals as they blunder abruptly into a brazen saxophone solo. Characteristically unconventional, ‘Sax In The City’ has all the components of a potent pop hit. As do several of the songs here. Crafted from unusual ingredients (how many other records can boast a good recorder solo?), Let’s Eat Grandma’s music is a challenge against convention.
Squirming at food they don’t like on ‘Chocolate Sludge Cake’ and screaming for comfort trapped within the grimmest of fairy tales on ‘Rapunzel’, there are times when the album verges on a childlike strop. The band are well aware of the uproar they’re creating. Embracing their immaturities and revelling in every moment of discomfort and bewilderment they create, the two-piece forge a sound that’s determinedly off kilter.
‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’ is perhaps the album’s defining moment: glimmering chimes meet heavy set synths as smoothly sailing vocals collide into a rap verse. United by driving percussion and rhythmic melodies, for all the track’s peculiarity it’s delivered with such conviction that it makes a perfect sense.
A soundscape from the bottom of the rabbit hole, ‘I, Gemini’ is a world of its own. Lost in their own fantasy, it can be hard to follow where the two band members are leading, but accept the unexpected and there isn’t a majesty quite like it. Jessica Goodman
