Let's Eat Grandma - The dollhouse dance

Friends since childhood, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth have coined one of the most distinctive musical languages of the new millennium. Holding onto a childlike gaze and a love of fairy tales, the pair write songs that sound as if they were meant to be played in an enchanted attic, ruled by heavy beats and toy instruments

by Michele Corrado

When Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth launched their recording venture under the name Let's Eat Grandma in 2016, their combined age was 34. Their bond, though, had begun much earlier.

Rosa and Jenny have been friends since the age of thirteen, when they shared bored afternoons in Norwich, the county town of Norfolk. From their earliest encounters, both nursing an unhealthy love of pop music, the two friends began performing covers and playing small local pubs.

Soon enough, given the pair's enormous creativity, the covers format started to feel too tight for the girls, who decided to forge their own musical language, drawing on the imagery of the Brothers Grimm as well as on musical trailblazers like Kate Bush and Bjork.

In 2014, manager Kyran Leonard spotted the bizarre moniker Let's Eat Grandma in the small print of the Norwich Sound And Vision Festival line-up, inspired by the famous punctuation meme, and, intrigued, went to see the show in person. Enthralled and amused by the originality of the act, Kyran introduced the pair, then just fifteen, to Transgressive. Offers and the customary contracts weren't long in coming, and neither was the thrilling debut titled I, Gemini, underlining the deep bond between Rosa and Jenny.

"Let's eat grandma": a name that bizarre could only match an equally bizarre musical proposition, one that calls for more than a couple of reference points to describe, yet which is far from being merely derivative. Does anyone remember Dead Man's Bones? The delightful project in which Ryan Gosling (yes, that Ryan Gosling) alternated indie verses with eerie choruses sung by children dressed up as werewolves, witches, little ghosts and all the rest. Well, the atmosphere conjured up by Let's Eat Grandma sits right in that neighbourhood, somewhere in the midst of an endless, tender Halloween night. As if mischievous little spirits had taken possession of Rosa and Jenny's doll-like bodies, turning them into two otherworldly Cocorosies, busy playing the soundtracks to Tim Burton's darkest films on toy instruments.

If some more technical detail is needed, one could speak of an imaginative art pop, certainly synth-based, but substantially enriched by bedroom-pop touches and solutions (music boxes and the quirkiest little keyboards). The nursery-rhyme melodies that intertwine the two Let's Eat Grandma singers' child-like voices are certainly crucial to the project's magic formula, but just as important are the long, dazed instrumental excursions, never banal, which give the project an intriguing sense of evolution.

In short, I, Gemini is not a record of our world: it comes straight out of the haunted attics of 80s and early 90s films. Out of The Goonies, Casper and Gremlins. It's a record that seems to arrive from another dimension, one that requires a portal to reach. Here that portal takes the shape of "Deep Six Textbook", a slow, floating lullaby that drifts through layer upon layer of synths until, in its music-box finale, it reaches the aforementioned other dimension.

Right after comes "Eat Shiitake Mushrooms", the track that, if one had to single one out, is the most unhinged on the record. The little dolls kick things off here with a rollicking prog intro, but soon slip in a four-on-the-floor kick that drags the whole thing into a disco for toys. Then, not satisfied with that, they enlist a furious, childlike rap about global warming.

"Sax In The City" is no pun: you really do see, and hear, a wheezing saxophone clumsily wandering through a ticking, bustling city. Another standout is "Rapunzel", in which urgent piano arpeggios reveal all the fairy-tale romanticism running through the veins of the then-teenage girls from Norwich.

Everything else is no less original than what's been described so far, which should be taken as an attempt to pick out highlights from a multifaceted, hugely varied record. Fifty minutes travelled at a fairly moderate pace, yet not without the occasional surge. Just like in dreams.

Just two years later, Rosa and Jenny, now both of legal age, wrote and released their sophomore effort I'm All Ears, a record just as surprising as the first, though for almost diametrically opposite reasons. It's clear from the first two or three tracks: on I'm All Ears the duo have set aside the toy instruments and vintage little keyboards of their debut, replacing them with a production that would make Lorde jealous, one that leans entirely into very modern, alluring pop textures.

Thick, weighty beats drive almost every track, and the synthesizers employed range from bittersweet late-summer atmospheres ("It's Not Just Me") to harsher, sharper sounds imported from Scandinavian electropop. The vocals often recall Karin Dreijer of about a decade ago, as on "Hot Pink" and "Falling Into Me", a track that, towards the end, also serves up an intriguing synthetic flute solo.

The duo's second record manages to make its sound, certainly less original than the one offered two years earlier, intriguing all the same. A goal achieved thanks to the never-banal architecture and development of the songs, which betray the two imaginary twins' undimmed passion for the more progressive side of pop.

Yet “Cool & Collected”, given a nocturnal cast by the dramatic smudges of a 90’s-style guitar, and “Donnie Darko” run to nine and eleven minutes respectively — not exactly what you'd expect from a pop record, in other words. Probably the best track of the lot, the latter impresses for the way it reinterprets the lessons of Giorgio Moroder (certainly absorbed through the lens of Daft Punk), letting a house BPM slip out from languid, skeletal guitar textures, before building to a synth-driven, full-blown finale.

Once you get past the disappointment of the near-total U-turn from the mood of their beloved debut, and skip a couple of weaker tracks (“I Will Be Waiting” sounds like a Shura B-side), you can conclude that I'm All Ears is a bet that pays off, one that stokes curiosity about the future of the two very young musicians from Norwich.

Listening to Two Ribbons inevitably comes with a faint aftertaste of disappointment, especially for longtime fans. Arriving four years after its predecessor, the album confirms the tendency, already set by I'm All Ears, to normalize the sound of the all-female Norwich duo. No more enchanted-attic atmospheres, toy instruments or pixie-ish poses for Rosa and Jenny, then.

Still, listening closely to this third effort from the pair, the maturity they've reached in handling well-established sonic languages (dance-pop in the first half of the record, dream-pop in the second), combined with deep and sincere lyrics, sweeps away at least part of that disappointment.

Once again at the lyrical heart of the project is the relationship between fellow singers and multi-instrumentalists Walton and Hollingworth. Then again, ever since their debut (titled, fittingly, I, Gemini), the two have considered themselves a kind of pair of almost-twins. This time, though, everything becomes more analytical and at times darker. Having set aside the childlike tones of their early days, the now twenty-three-year-olds reflect song after song on how much, and in what way, time has affected their relationship. From this point of view, the most interesting track is the closing one, also the title track, in which the two singers trade off, recounting their own version of events just like in a psychoanalysis session.

The track seals a second half of the album that's dreamy and slow, with proper songs alternating with picturesque interludes. While “Sunday” shows the duo tackling a fairly ordinary brand of dream-pop, “Strange Conversations” takes the girls into uncharted territory of orchestral folk.

The first half of the record is cut from very different cloth, though — we could call it a cheeky dance-pop romp with a holy card of Moroder tucked in the vest pocket. It kicks off with dance fireworks (also present in sampled form on “Happy New Year”), before dipping the synths into a syrup of Oriental flavors (“Levitation”) and paying tribute to Blondie (“Whatching You Go”).

The most interesting songs, however, are the ones that close out the first section: “Hall Of Mirrors”, with its lush brass finale, but above all the exotic “Insect Loop”, a kind of irresistible europop built on melancholy, battered synthesizers.