You can answer with a deepening seriousness of your own, or you can offer some kind of escape. Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton may have taken a more reflective – even sombre – tone for their last album as Let’s Eat Grandma, but Hollingworth’s solo debut falls firmly into the take-a-break-from-reality camp: it’s the most unashamedly poppy thing either of the women have yet created, together or apart, and it seeks to make a virtue of unobtrusiveness, of resolutely refusing to push the boat out. As Hollingworth (who’s taken the non-committal moniker “Jenny on Holiday”) puts it, “I’m not really concerned with trying to do stuff that’s interesting for the sake of it.”
And so we get an album whose production style – unassuming, repetitive, and worlds away from the dramatic twists and turns of LEG’s I’m All Ears – harks back to the lush sophistipop of bands like Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile, all melodic guitars and rippling piano riffs that seek to push attention forwards onto the songs. This makes sense, and Hollingworth plays to her strengths here: her witchy voice, her knack for a slightly unsettling metaphor (“I’ve got a quicksand heart, I’ve got bones made of fucked-up straw”), her ear for the kind of big, iteratively insistent choruses that get Latitude crowds hollering along. The “quicksand heart” metaphor giving the album its title is one of many that envision bodies as an expendable resource, drained by love affairs (“Every Ounce of Me”) or charged by electrical currents (“Pacemaker”), even chewed up (“Appetite”). That kind of bodily anxiety has always been there in LEG’s work, but it loses its edge thanks to those frustratingly bland production choices, most noticeable when the songwriting is least interesting.
And there’s an unfortunate run of less-than-interesting songs here, starting with “These Streets I Know” and continuing through what ought to be the album’s beating heart, a consistently “meh” sequence that doesn’t let up until we’re a couple of tracks from the end. “Do You Still Believe in Me?” thankfully kicks things back into life with a syncopated drum beat buoyed by snarling guitars, and lyrics that demand a little more attention: Hollingworth is a great storyteller when she wants to be, and here it seems like she does. Album-closer “Appetite” is also good. But too much of Quicksand Heart feels rushed, or perhaps consciously unambitious, eschewing bold creative strokes in favour of the kind of inoffensive consistency you might put on at a cheese and wine night to set the mood. Its best songs are worth a relisten; taken as a whole, though, it’s something of a disappointment.
