Written by: Dave Cantrell
I’ve seldom felt so remiss. As I begin writing this review it’s been three weeks to the day since I, Gemini was released via Transgressive and, while it’s true that a window has only now opened up in my schedule to finally address this stunner of a debut and the stunning story surrounding it, what I should have done was unceremoniously trample over whatever at the time stood in my way of that window and thrust it open to the world with the force demanded by a record of this stature. There is undiluted wonder here, taking the form of wounded, subverted fairy tales, intensely (and playfully) disassembled shanties, of sinister trip-hoppy pop tales built equally out of innocent beauty and knowing winks of irony. Indeed the prevailing response hearing this record through front to back is one of scarcely being able to believe it.
Rosa Walton, 16, and her best bud since preschool Jenny Hollingsworth, aged 17, working under the deliciously macabre grammar meme Let’s Eat Grandma – punctuation is important, all you text-happy kids – are the breathtakingly precocious British duo responsible, presenting a set of songs filled with finesse, immediacy, and innovation (often with the assistance of – gasp! – a recorder) that comes at you with a cunningly naive appearance that fails marvelously at masking what is in fact as accomplished a piece of work as any debut in recent memory. Imagine the Shaggs if they’d been driven by the fevered visions of Björk drunk on the influence of Kate Bush, all filtered through the fearless structural prisms of aspiring Zappaistas. Oh that I were overstating. Oh that it were possible to overstate.
Hear the alluring, narcotic haze dream of first track “Deep Six Textbook” that presents the shivering poignancy of Flotation Toy Warning in an alternate universe where it’s maybe two teenaged survivor sisters from the Titanic doing the singing, ghost angels both in a slow swirl of defiance and mellontron-y bliss, and tell me that I’m exaggerating. Move on to latest ‘single’ (the term seems a bit academic in the context of a record like this) “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” with its ersatz, surreal carnival TV soundtrack vibe taking on a Nipponese pop dimension that happens to be caught in an embrace of child’s-nightmare glockenspiel, clown face organ and a chest-hollowing bass synth, all of it cohering into a multi-faceted head-nodding breakdown that’s like Puffy Ami Yumi spun inside an electro-magnetic modulator designed to re-imagine Abba as some strange Richard James side project (with, naturally, a hint of Brit-rap stepping tucked neatly in its center), or, selecting at random, move further on to “Chimpanzees in Canopies” that behaves as might a bedraggled Celtic ballad that’s been gently fractured until it’s throwing about avant-folk shapes, as if this Rosa and Jenny are the impish children of Joanna Newsome and Devendra Banhart – mandolins, a violin, visits of disembodied piano that remind of movie dreams we’ve yet had – and tell me I’ve gone a bit overboard. From track to track we swing as upon a vine from marvel to marvel.
“Rapunzel”‘s piano twinkles like glitter caught in the cat’s tail as it sneaks through the shadows of the newel post before a narrative bursts forth with such disturbing clarity it can’t help but be hilarious, despite the tune turning to lie abed in the album’s most somber, darkly dramatic undertones, in the process suggesting the Brothers Grimm were the world’s first and best tragi-comedians. The woozy and wandering childhood idyll that opens “Sax in the City” soon gives way to a barking mad sax-sounding electric guitar, a rhythm ukulele, and an organ courtesy Lurch (kidding) before the voices come traipsing back over it all in a pop singer stylee as if we have Katy Perry performing at the local asylum’s daycare center, while the bespoke “Sleep Song” takes us to a French café between the wars where we’re dutifully seduced by a recorder/pump organ flock of noise eclipsed by vocals gone full-on nightmare madhouse dreamtime and yes that’s contradictory but believe me in context it’s really not. You get the picture and if I’ve done my job that picture is something of a kaleidoscopic montage with razor-sharp compositional lines that in sound-equivalence terms you might describe as the “Nude Descending A Staircase” of crayon drawings.
If it’s not been clear, there is indeed a quivering, OCD-inflected childlike-ness to Let’s Eat Grandma’s songmaking but, for one, it’s the very embrace of that quality, with little-to-no care as to how it’s received critically, commercially, whateverly, that propels these two beyond – and inoculates them from – accusations of being nothing but dabbling ingénues in thrall to the bliss of their own post-pubescent mischievousness (in this sense, one supposes, Rose and Jenny are our current day’s original blithe spirits), and for two, christ man, just listen. One spin and you’ll know: the transfix is in. Though, if this is witchiness it’s of a naturalistic, ramshackle but very canny type, steampunked, mildly gothy allegories that coil their way inward with rudderless precision until they reach those weird truths hiding inside our subconscious. Such is the flat-out craft and unfettered nous displayed on I, Gemini. I have no idea how in the world the pair will follow it up but know I’ll be deeply intrigued by that prospect even when I think I’m not thinking about it.
Great debut albums bring us something we weren’t expecting, aren’t prepared for and didn’t know we were missing. Let’s Eat Grandma, with what we may well call their out-in-the-open mystique, have ticked all three of those boxes with the wildly unselfconscious grace that could only come from the sylph hands of teenage prodigies, which these two assuredly are, making I, Gemini an ecstatic accident waiting to happen. All else aside, with this album out there, we live in a lucky time. [don’t delay, buy I, Gemini here]
