Every now and again we need a reminder that, as a society, we really have no business condescending to adolescents, especially with art that insults their intelligence and fails to speak to the depth of their experience. I, Gemini, the debut album by teenaged English duo Let’s Eat Grandma, inadvertently nudges us to remember that we have just as much to learn from teenagers as they supposedly do from us. “Wise beyond its years,” so to speak, the album begins with the funereal beat and keyboard swells of “Deep Six Textbook,” a song that Let's Eat Grandma enshrouded in a haze of gloom.
On “Textbook,” with just a few simple ingredients—including handclaps, glockenspiel, an ethereal keyboard solo that sounds like bagpipes emanating from a dream state, and heaps of reverb—multi-instrumentalists Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton make typical musical expressions of “sadness” seem one-dimensional by comparison. In just about any other musician's hands, the crawling solemnity of “Deep Six Textbook” would be melodramatic if not outright suffocating. Somehow, though, Let’s Eat Grandma and producer Will Twynham (Mary Epworth, Kiran Leonard) manage to make dour moods both enticing and multi-faceted.
From there, I, Gemini assumes a more playful cadence on its second track, the warped Latin-tinged pop “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms,” which recalls Blondie and the Tom Tom Club’s early-‘80s singles. Still, Hollingworth and Walton maintain an air of frosty gravitas throughout the album, even when it’s clear that they’re trying to be whimsical. This is all the more impressive considering that the pair’s high-pitched, squeaky voices at times sound like they belong more to elementary school-aged children than teenagers. Of course, the contrast between the childlike vocals and the daring experimentalism of the music can be rather unsettling.
One can only presume that Twynham and Let’s Eat Grandma are playing up this contrast on purpose in order to re-create the mood of fairy tales that pit children against menacing threats. But other than the misguided rap on “Eat Shiitake,” Walton and Hollingworth don’t exactly come off as naive. In fact, their unwavering air of groundedness that makes for a more chilling effect. Musically speaking, the pair’s control is, in fact, exceptional—especially when you consider how so many adult artists use similar instrumentation to sound like they’re knocking around in a toy store. For all its baroque weirdness, evoking at times both Kate Bush and St. Vincent, I, Gemini holds together remarkably well.
Let’s Eat Grandma have clearly learned to make maximum use of space. Even on the intentionally ramshackle, wobbly-groove of “Sax in the City,” I, Gemini never sounds haphazard. Whenever Walton and Hollingworth reach for a new instrument, they sound assured, not like they’re trying to give the impression that they’re finger painting with sound, and certainly not like they're going to let the music unravel. “Chocolate Sludge Cake,” for example, opens with two and a half minutes’ worth of gentle recorder flutters that recall Peter Gabriel’s flute playing on Genesis’ forays into pastoral English folk during the early-‘70s. The song then blossoms into chaos as Let’s Eat Grandma sing about the different cakes they're going to bake—apple, coffee, chocolate, etc.
Genesis tunes like “Supper’s Ready” and “Firth of Fifth” became classics not only because of Gabriel’s hammy strangeness, but because that band was subverting music and imagery that had been deeply embedded in the English psyche while forging the sound we would come to know as prog. Let’s Eat Grandma appear to tap-into the same collective unconscious of nursery rhymes and folktales, with a distinctly English twist. With I, Gemini Let’s Eat Grandma not only hold their own with their predecessors, but they also create a world that demands you come to it on its own terms, not the other way around. An impressive achievement from musicians of any age.
