Review of I, Gemini Album by Let's Eat Grandma

You guess that 17 year olds Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth called themselves Let's Eat Grandma as some kind of obscure teenage in-joke, but in the flesh the pair - who come across as the twins from The Shining after a really free-thinking finishing school - are revealed as much more than a creepy adolescent in-joke. Musical polyglots who live will employ xylophone, mandolin and recorder in amongst their rickety Gothic psychedelia, their manner is enhanced by an apparent sense of telepathy, the duo having been friends since before school and gigged around their home town of Norwich to general bemusement.

Let's Eat Grandma I, Gemini Album

Sax And The City is typical of their atypicalness, the title a shonky play on words whilst they continue to straddle the line between bewitched genius and maladroit chaos, usually within the same moment. There are some fairly obvious elemental strands to this brew - Kate Bush, 60's girl bands, Laura Marling, Bjork - although blithely both of the girls claim they've never heard of any of them.

No matter: like earlier releases Deep Six Textbook (Crepuscular trip hop meets Beach House) and Eat Shiitake Mushrooms (Lysergic, busting nursery rhymes in the style of Bush's Wuthering Heights) it's as gloriously under the top, a smorgasbord of ideas that struggles to keep up with itself. Opening with sunshine keys, a mouth organ and then dissolving into what sounds like a distorted sax and/or guitar, the words float around like Year 10 poetry "Now get off your device and concentrate/The car's about to hit you" and yet despite all the experimentation, other worldliness and lashings of general odd, the sum of the parts is truly fascinating.

Fascinating is usually a term ascribed to music that's hip but too niche for Joe Public to "Get"; in this case it means what it means, in that Let's Eat Grandma are making noise for themselves that survives any hint of introversion, genuinely door-opening insight into minds raised entirely under the duress of modern cultural overload. Their album I, Gemini promises to be one of the wildest rides of the year.


Let's Eat Grandma on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/thelegofgrandma/

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