Let's Eat Grandma - I, Gemini

Smoke

Let's write reviews in full perfume.

Juniper

Those words make as much sense as the lyrics on this album.  That sentence has as much charm as this music.

Sandalwood

This band represents everything people hate about hipsters.  It's desperate, affected, inauthentic, and twee.

Pine

This band has failed to achieve anything resembling a professional sound.  They are the aural equivalent of a drunk fresher in a dorm room in the late 90's, and they are about as accomplished as that wankered naïf's first attempt.

Ambergris

I'll allow that, done well, that aesthetic can lend experiment and authenticity to talent.  In this case, though, any of the joy of low-fi, garage tinkering, or of witnessing raw talent unblemished by overproduction, is destroyed by the grottiness of the way they combine poorly tinkered with keyboard and a seemingly random smorgasbord of other sounds, with no regard for the result of the combination.  If it was true Dadaistic anarchism I could respect it, but they are too constrained by convention - or, perhaps, fear of stepping properly outside of the mainstream - to go beyond the crass.  They show a casual and, frankly, tedious disregard for the ensuing aesthetics.  It's just too pretty to be a deliberate, philosophical choice of being unconscious of results, and not pleasing enough to show that they care.

Neroli

Any attempt at authenticity is likewise undermined by the affectations they adopt constantly.  They don't know who or what they are.  Each song offers a different sound altogether, without any hint of being the same band - let alone having a cohesive strand of timbre or interest - yet without recognisably aiming to mix genres and sounds.  Basically, it sounds as though they are doing poor imitations of various existing famous artists; Bjork, KT Tunstall, any hipster band ever... They want so hard to be anyone except themselves - they are searching so hard for a scrap of authenticity - that it ends up as cheap mimicry; endless impressions that have neither the depth nor uniqueness of the originals.  Shallow wishes spun into the gloom of their own backing track.  Even the accents are adopted, and I'm just not sure I want asynchronous karaoke.

Clove

The climax of their album is a ukulele backed duet, which should have been obvious really.  When I say climax I don't, of course, mean it as an orgasmic height, but more the inevitable, blistery end point of climbing a steep flight of hundreds of stairs with a severe wedgie.  It's nicely sung, pretty, with interweaving voices that are actually allowed to be themselves instead of striving for something they are not.  The result is so much better than anything else they make that it is sad they could not allow themselves to do it throughout.  The problem is that it is such a cliche, albeit a sweet one, that coming on the back of the ultimate lazy wannabe hipster album, it seems like a bitter-tasting mockery of the listener.

Myrrh

The hipster levels are so high no non-hipster could possibly survive them.  Lyrics like 'Let's eat Grandma... in full colour' sound at first ear-glance poetic but, let's face it, are proper reit asinine.  Ridiculous, meaningless verbiage meant to make them seem full blown manic pixie wistful whimsy.  I felt like I'd chugged condensed milk and then been a tad sick in my mouth.

Olbas

So yeah, let's do everything in full something, or something.  Whatever, we're pretty and cool, right?