Let’s Eat Grandma — I’m All Ears (Jun 29, 2018)

                     Let’s Eat Grandma — I’m All Ears (Jun 29, 2018)  ★⦿★          I’m All Ears je jemné a čestné album, které se pohybuje svým vlastním přesvědčivým tempem. Odráží růst a zrání Walton a Hollingworth po dobu přibližně dvou let; je to tvořivé a infekční album, které po opakovaném poslechu získává jiný level pocitovosti: od tušení, že je zajímavé — k přesvědčení o neodolatelnosti. Neustále překvapuje dalšími a dalšími dynamickými zvraty spolu se způsoby rozvíjení hudebních témat, které vyžadují vaši pozornost. Texty jsou jak ze živé pouště, vskutku podpovrchové, nesou jistou poetickou sílu a tak podezírám Rosu a Jenny z plánované utajované návštěvy Marsu. Vždyť na Marsu je poesie na každém kroku..., cool & collected.     
Location: Norwich, UK
Album release: Jun 29, 2018
Record Label: Transgressive Records / [PIAS]
Duration:     51:38
Tracks:
01 Whitewater     1:56
02 Hot Pink     4:10
03 It’s Not Just Me     3:56
04 Falling Into Me     5:47
05 Snakes & Ladders     5:58
06 Missed Call (1)     0:38
07 I Will Be Waiting     4:24
08 The Cat’s Pyjamas     1:06
09 Cool & Collected     9:18
10 Ava      3:05
11 Donnie Darko     11:20
℗ 2018 Let’s Eat Grandma, under exclusive license to Transgressive Records / [PIAS]
Product Description
★↔★       I’m All Ears is an even greater revelation than Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth’s globally acclaimed debut, I, Gemini. The second act from the British teenage vocalists, multi~instrumentalists and songwriters, is the most startling, infectious, innovative and thrilling record you’ll hear this year. It is alive with furious pop, unapologetic grandeur, intimate ballads; with loops, Logic, outrageous 80s drum solos, as well as production from David Wrench (The xx/Frank Ocean/Caribou), SOPHIE (famed for her own material and work with Madonna, Charli XCX and Vince Staples) and Faris Badwan (The Horrors). It’s an album that cements Let’s Eat Grandma as one of the most creative and exciting bands in the world right now.
About:
★↔★       Taking their name from the popular Internet grammar meme, Let’s Eat Grandma is the otherworldly pop project of Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth. The pair became best friends while they were still children growing up in Norwich, U.K., and began making music together when they were 13. At first, they recorded themselves covering popular songs, but soon grew bored and began writing their own material, which was as likely to borrow from chart~topping acts as it was from Grimm’s fairy tales or the likes of Björk or Kate Bush. By the time they were 15, Hollingworth and Walton were performing live shows, and were noticed by Kiran Leonard, who saw their name on a poster for the 2014 Norwich Sound & Vision Festival. The duo soon shared management with Leonard and signed to Transgressive Records. A trio of singles, “Deep Six Textbook,” “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms,” and “Rapunzel,” arrived in early 2016, a few months before Let’ s Eat Grandma’s first full~length I, Gemini (which was recorded in a former nuclear bunker) appeared that June. 2018 saw the release of the single “Hot Pink,” which was produced by SOPHIE and the Horrors’  Faris Badwan. ~ Heather Phares
Discography:
★    I, Gemini     17 June 2016     #149 UK
★    I’m All Ears     29 June 2018
Press:
★↔★       “They’ve revealed themselves as a rare, brilliant talent.” — Q Magazine Score: 100 [Summer 2018, p.104]
★↔★       “If they’ve perfected the modern pop template associated with acts like SOPHIE (on production duties here) — and they have — it’s somehow not the most impressive element of the record. The second half of the album includes a pair of breathtaking epics, ‘Cool & Collected’ and ‘Donnie Darko’, that showcase a songwriting maturity well beyond their 18 and 19 years.” — Clash Music — Score: 90
Reviews:
Tom Breihan | June 26, 2018 — 1:05 pm | ALBUM OF THE WEEK
★↔★     They’re kids! That was the general tenor of the discussion around the UK duo Let’s Eat Grandma two years ago, when they released their debut album I, Gemini. Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth met each other in a kindergarten art class in their shared hometown of Norwich, and they’ve been best friends and collaborators ever since. They were both teenagers when they released I, Gemini, an album that sounded like what happens when two kids build their own dreamworld and get lost in it. There was something charming and intuitive about that album’s gauzy psychedelic swirl, even if it still showed plenty of bad ideas. (There was a part where they both rapped.) The general consensus, at least if I’m remembering it right, was that Let’s Eat Grandma had come up with an impressive, promising debut, especially for an album made by a couple of teenagers. But there’s a problem with that formulation. Because Walton and Hollingworth are still both teenagers now, and yet they’re kids! is an entirely insufficient way to frame I’m All Ears, their new album.
★↔★     On every level, I’m All Years is a tremendous leap for Let’s Eat Grandma, a whole order of magnitude more confident and fully realized than I, Gemini. The new album is the moment where Walton and Hollingworth move far beyond the starry~eyed warmth and genre~agnostic twee of their debut. Instead, it’s an album with tremendous style and adventurous self~assurance. The two young friends play around with indie rock and synthpop and psychedelia and dance music with absolute calm and focus, and they do it while smartly interrogating relationship dynamics and the illusions that we build up around each other. They’ve integrated big-name collaborators without losing their own voices, and they’ve found a way to blow their sound all the way out while still keeping it hard and grounded. It’s a textbook example of the moment when a newish artist goes beyond “promising” and into the zone of “just straight~up good.”
★↔★     Let’s Eat Grandma are still relative unknowns, so it’s probably not surprising to see so much of the pre~release hype around I’m All Ears going to the group’s collaborators. The duo wrote the two early singles “Hot Pink” and “It’s Not Just Me” with the team of SOPHIE, the dizzying mutant~pop producer who just released her own excellent debut album OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN~INSIDES, and Farris Badwan, frontman of the great Brit~rock shapeshifters the Horrors. It’s a canny choice of collaborators. In SOPHIE, they’ve found someone currently exploding pop convention in ways that are challenging and exciting. In Badwan, they’ve found someone who knows about being in a British band that’s trying to make the grand blind leap into greatness. And together, these four people have made two giddy, fluttering, heart~palpitatingly intense pop songs. “Hot Pink” is a snarly breakup song being transmitted from the inside of a celestial pinball machine, while “It’s Not Just Me” could be an absolute roller~disco jam in some better alternate reality.
★↔★     Those songs are total triumphs, and they’re also clear signs that Let’s Eat Grandma have come to understand exactly what they’re doing. But those two songs are also the only ones to feature the involvement of SOPHIE and Badwan. And it’s to Walton and Hollingworth’s tremendous credit that those two songs don’t overshadow the rest of the record. The two friends recorded most of the album with producer David Wrench, whose previous biggest production credit is probably Bear In Heaven’s I Love You, It’s Cool. Wrench isn’t as showy a name as SOPHIE or Badwan, and yet the album doesn’t really flag at all in its other songs. Instead, Let’s Eat Grandma use his slick synthetic textures to explore sounds and ideas and feelings with exactly the same level of grace and confidence that they had on those two singles. That means that Walton and Hollingworth are the geniuses here. They get the credit.
★↔★     The rest of the album veers all over the map. “Cool & Collected” is a dazed~but~passionate nine~minute guitar~jangle, one that builds up to quiet emotional crescendoes. “Falling Into Me” is rippling, sighing synthetic dance~pop with some truly inspired cowbell work. “I Will Be Waiting” has Beach House~esque organs and reverb-drenched ahh~ahhh backing vocals and icy xylophone chimes; it’s a piece of music trapped between the worlds of dream~pop and actual pop, drawing some of the best things from both places. “Snakes & Ladders” sounds like a warehouse art~space remix of Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman.” And then there’s the album~closing 11~minute stunner “Donnie Darko,” which builds from tough and precise indie~pop to expansive house stomp and then contracts back again.
★↔★     Musical wandering is nothing new for Let’s Eat Grandma, though they’re doing it with a sense of purpose and clarity now that they didn’t have on the first album. But one thing that’s entirely new is the duo’s lyrical focus. On “Hot Pink,” for instance, they witheringly pick apart the ways that another person refuses to see them as actual people: “I’m just an object of disdain to you / I’m only 17, I don’t know what you mean.” But a few minutes later, they’re also reminding the song’s target of the unreciprocated emotional work that they’re doing: “You wouldn’t believe the lengths I’ve gone to for you / You wouldn’t believe the shit that I can do.” The whole song works as both a plea and a threat — both getting across that we should not underestimate them.
★↔★     “Cool & Collected,” on the other hand, is a confident song about having a crippling lack of confidence. On that one, Walton and Hollingworth sing about being in awe of someone else and about how that feeling can then make them like themselves less: “I’m just so obsessed with you / I’m always such a mess with you… I wish I was you / I blur in the haze that you cut straight through.” And even a throwaway line about cell phones — “I don’t wanna say goodbye / Guess I’ll see you when my screen is vibrating” — carries a certain poetic force.
★↔★     Walton and Hollingworth, whose voices are so similar that I haven’t yet learned to tell them apart, both sound a bit like Lorde. They’ve got that untrained grace, that observational wryness that can be a bit flat vocally but only in expressive ways. And like Lorde, they have now moved from precocious novelty to genuine force. But that’s where the comparison ends. Lorde is gunning for a boutiquey form of pop stardom, and she is excelling at it. Let’s Eat Grandma are making clean, appealing, accessible music, but it’s not really pop in the same way that Lorde is. Instead, they’re building their own soundworlds. I have a feeling that they’re only going to get better at it. But as of right now, they’ve come a whole lot further than most of us will ever get.
★↔★     https://www.stereogum.com/
Also:
By Saam Idelji~Tehrani | 25 JUNE 2018, 09:00 BST | Score: 8.5
★↔★     The return of Let’s Eat Grandma (alongside the cosmic~lounge music of Arctic Monkeys) has, debatably, provided one of 2018’s most surprising reinventions. I’m All Ears is not, however, solely concerned with reinvention for the sake of reinvention, but is really the sound of late~teenage exploration and maturity. 
★↔★      https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/growing-up-with-lets-eat-grandma-on-im-all-ears
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Let’s Eat Grandma — I’m All Ears (Jun 29, 2018)

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