Among the most underrated of the riot-grrrl-adjacent bands of the ’90s and early 2000s were Babes in Toyland associates Angelica, whose best tracks were marked by a distinctly wry humor. The Lancaster, England group’s post-feminist crush lament “Liberation Is Wasted on Me,” for instance, is a long, performative sigh into a rose bouquet, a sweeping gesture toward the enlightened single crowd set to the “Be My Baby” rhythm; pause, punchline. The pummeling punk arrangement that kicks in about a minute into the song certainly doesn’t hurt matters.
Angelica’s Holly Ross went on to form the Lovely Eggs with her husband David Blackwell, formerly of the psychedelic band Three Dimensional Tanx, circa 2006, and over the past decade they’ve taken that sense of humor gonzo to cult acclaim. Representative tracks from the duo’s catalog include “Have You Ever Heard a Digital Accordion,” which features no notable digital accordion content; “Fuck It,” surely the most languid song that has been or ever will be recorded by that title; and the raucous, exhaustive bestiary of owns that is “Don’t Look At Me (I Don’t Like It).” Ever thought about someone’s “sausage-roll thumb” or “washing-line smile”? You have now.
This Is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs’ fifth album, befits its name—it’s as good an introduction as you’ll get to the group and its charmingly skewed perspective on the world. Over the years, they’ve gotten steadily heavier, from their early acoustic style to the likes of 2015’s “Magic Onion,” eventually settling on a sound that evokes psychedelic-punk touchstones like the Buzzcocks and some of the hooky, madcap glee of Charly Bliss. Or, in Ross’ own words: “It kind of sounds like a chip shop on fire.” Credit, in part, a change in personnel. Where the group’s previous albums were self-produced, Eggland brings in Dave Fridmann, known for helping the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala scale up their psychedelia to arena levels.
It’s common to the point of cliché to have a big-name producer arrive midway through a band’s career, sand down all the lo-fi edges, and replace them with studio gimmickry. But Ross and Blackwell, ever self-aware, make their upgraded sound part of the joke. “I’m With You” introduces itself with Missile Command whirs, and “Return of Witchcraft” is slathered in guitar distortion. The whiplash left-right panning of “Hello I Am Your Sun”—the opening track, and the most psyched-out song here—feels like it’s jostling you, vigorously, into the right headspace.
The defining tone of that headspace turns out to be unrelenting, gleeful pop-punk, from the swaggering riff and stop-start structure of “Dickhead” to the deadpan delivery of “Let Me Observe” to the single “I Shouldn’t Have Said That,” which mixes Ross loud and up-front. “I shouldn’t have said that—it was evil of me!” she shouts through a megaphone-like effect, with about as much remorse as Eartha Kitt. “Witchcraft” begins as a cry of joy and ends as an exorcism. “Would You Fuck” teases out a dozen or so inflections from its title, a series of increasingly wacky pulled faces. “Wiggy Giggy” does for Lancaster what the Weakerthans’ “One Great City!” did for Winnipeg. On This is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs sound like they’ve ventured out to the interplanetary shitholes of outer space and decided that the one they’ve got is quite all right.
