LET'S EAT GRANDMA
I, Gemini
(Transgressive)
director's cut, The Wire, June 2016)
by Simon Reynolds
Nationality feels like an impermissible topic to bring up
when writing about the appeal of music. Like
something that’s vaguely discredited, or at least outmoded: left behind for good (in both senses) in our
post-geographical, distance-shrinking world.
Celebrating hybridity, intermixture and impurity is always going to seem
more progressive than fetishising the essential, the unchanging, the
parochial. Yet national character
continues to have a potent attraction.
Englishness of a particular musty sort seeps from every pore of
eMMplekz’s dankly addictive Rook to TN34.
And Englishness of a brightly enchanted kind forms a fragrant haze around I, Gemini , the debut album from Let’s
Eat Grandma.
This teenage duo could hardly be more English, from their
names – Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton—to their singing voices, which have
the crumbly texture of Wensleydale, reminding me at various points of Sophie
from Detectorists, Cassie in Skins, and Lola from the kids’s
animation series Charlie and Lola. The
only time they break the spell of quintessential Englishness is their name –
they should really be called Let’s Eat Granny.
Musically, too, they summon to mind a bunch of frightfully
English things: Danielle Dax, Matching
Mole, Pram, Kate Bush. Not that they
ever really sound much like any of these. But the ballpark – or should I say, cricket pitch – is the same:
quirky, homespun, a little precious, child-like in a way that teeters close to
twee but never crosses the line.
Let’s Eat Grandma play up their Englishness and their tender
years with the way they present in photo sessions and in the video for the
single “Deep Six Textbook”. With their lace frocks, long golden tresses, and milky
complexions, they come across a bit like modern-day equivalents of the
miscreants behind the Cottingley Fairies photographs – girl-cousins who let
their imaginations get away with them and fooled half the world. On “Deep Six
Textbook,” Jenny and Rosa sing as classroom daydreamers who’d rather be
communing with the starfish and the ocean than stuck indoors being trained for
productive adulthood: “we live our lives in the textbook... I feel like
standing on the desk and screaming ‘I DON’T CARE!’”. Listening to their motley sound-palette, you
often picture a school music room full of battered instruments: recorder,
ukulele, electric organ, xylophone, triangle, rough-toned violin, the stray
components of a drum kit, a long outmoded synth. Song titles like “Chimpanzees in Canopies”
and “Welcome To The Treehouse” evoke Nature Studies projects, school trips to
the zoo, and back garden fun ’n’ games.
But the innocence doesn’t feel forced. At sixteen and
seventeen, Hollingworth and Walton are barely out of childhood. More like sisters than the
friends-since-age-four they are, their voices appear to have grown alike
through prolonged proximity, like plants entwining together in a neglected
garden. Gemini is the Latin for twins and the album title I, Gemini seems to speak of a near-telepathic bond: a single mind
shared across two bodies.
Sometimes the organic quality of I, Gemini feels a little off the cuff. “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” coalesces haphazardly
at first, like a primary school music class converging around a tune, while
“Sax in the City” sounds like a one-man band with its ukulele, toy cymbal, and
honking horn. But the thrown-togetherness is deceptive: there’s a consummate attentiveness to texture,
structure, and, most vividly, space in evidence. “Deep Six Textbook” sounds like a song heard
with a seashell cupped to your ear. Its muzzy washes of Caravan-keyboard and
stoic tick-tock beat set deep in the distance have me casting back to late
Eighties recordings by A.R. Kane and Cocteau Twins for an equivalent sense of intimate
emptiness.
Norwich, the girls’ hometown, is a bustling city in a county
that’s largely rural, full of flat expanses, and often considered a bit of a
backwater. Like an audio illustration
for Raymond Williams’s English culture study The Country and The City, the album shuttles back and forth on a branch
line that stretches from Virginia Astley to Lady Sovereign. Just when you think they’re all about winsome
pastoralism, Let’s Eat Grandma will start rapping – sounding, on “Eat
Shiitake Mushrooms”, like Cranes’s baby-voiced Alison Shaw reborn as a grime MC
from E3. Whether sung or spat, Hollingworth
& Walton’s slack enunciation belies their out-of-time, Picnic At Hanging Rock image: this is actually a rather modern style of
singing*, something you hear across the spectrum from Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding and Selena Gomez to AlunaGeorge and James Blake.
But Let’s Eat Grandma push it further, smudging fricatives and bilabials, making syllables
fold and kink sideways, half-swallowing
their vowels or swilling them around the palate. It’s like they’re delectating
in their own voice-stuff, and who could blame them?
This meld of savory-sweet singing, moreish melody,
glistening texture, strange space and surprises galore makes I, Gemini the best pop-not-pop album
since Micachu & the Shapes’s Jewellery.
(Without ever resembling it at all). And
as with that album, Gemini is backloaded: each new song better than
the one that precedes. Things really take off as we pass the half-way mark.
“Rapunzel” is their “Wuthering Heights”:
romanticism so gauchely gushing only 17 year olds can get away with it. The
song starts with an upper-octave piano cycle that spins an atmosphere of
twinkly magic, like the moment in Le
Grand Meaulnes when the protagonist stumbles on the lost chateau in the
forest. Then it gathers to a pounding pitch of tempestuous grandeur, with a
storyline about a 7-year-old runaway from domestic discord suddenly stricken
with the realization “I’m not having fun in this fairy tale”.
“Sleep Song” likewise starts gently with
wheezy harmonium and plangent crinkles of guitar, then the lullaby bends to the
sinister with a babble of increasingly clashing voices, before spiraling into a
sort of soaring plummet of night-terror.
A song in two parts, “Welcome To The Treehouse” is their “Cloudbusting”:
the angelic screech of the vocals is the sound of hearts exploding, but who can
tell whether they’re bursting with joy or dread.
The star sign Gemini
(mine, as it happens) has among its strengths imagination, quickness,
and adaptability; among its weaknesses,
impulsiveness, flightiness, and
indecision. That all just sounds like the checklist for
adolescence. I Gemini ‘s allure for me as an aging expatriate is not just the
reassuring idea that Englishness abides, but that adolescence is much the same
as it ever was. The trappings have
changed – Instagram and Snapchat, rather than scrapbooks and pen pals – but the
fundamental things apply: boredom,
longing, restlessness, wonder, lust, spite, curiosity, confusion. “Oh yeah life goes on / Long after the thrill
of livin’ has gone”, warned that least-English of all singers Johnny Cougar,
before advising: “Hold onto sixteen as long as you can/Changes come around real
soon make us women and men”. If you
can’t find still and grasp tight within yourself those sensations of unformed
possibility, then second-best is to grab them vicariously, through music that’s
as thrillingly alive and ardently awake as this.
^^^^^^^^^^
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