Let’s Eat Grandma look like two totally normal human people, which might surprise anyone who only knows them through their records. The British pop duo first emerged in 2016 with a slew of dark fairytales fitted for the dancefloor on I, Gemini, then updated and polished their semi-goth aesthetics for 2018 album of the year contender I’m All Ears. With all that in mind, we expected a pair of brought-to-life Jhonen Vasquez drawings to take the stage at Great Scott last night (September 10). But, nah — Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth already sound spooky enough without having to dress the part.
Maybe the distance between our expectations and the reality of the situation can be chalked up to a universal sentiment best articulated in an old My Chemical Romance song; “Teenagers scare the living shit out of me.” Most of the time when we hear a teenager sing a song, it’s a song written by an adult intended for an audience the author assumes is stupid. But since the actual experience of adolescence is a Cronenbergian nightmare and Let’s Eat Grandma can only draw material from their own lived experience, of course their music scans as “horror-influenced” or “macabre” or whathaveyou to those of us north of 20.
That doesn’t mean Let’s Eat Grandma purposefully set out to frighten us, the horrible adults. To the contrary; it appears they only wish tidings of merriment and good humor, as was emphatically stated at Monday’s sold-out shebang. Walton and Hollingworth rolled out with the deadly banger “Hot Pink” and glided into the ethereal, expansive side of their catalogue, which entailed leaning hard into newer material. (No “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” or “Rapunzel,” sadly). They handled most of their own auxiliary parts (saxophone, guitar, a woodwind instrument I wanna say is a recorder but I’m not sure), and a drummer whose name I really wish I could track down did more heavy lifting than they’re getting credit for.
Flashes of transcendence materialized during slow-burning, 10-minute infernos of “Cool and Collected” and particularly “Donnie Darko.” The latter aural adventure included unexplained bouts of lying down onstage, a half-synchronized patty cake session, and a comparatively more typical bout of crowd surfing on the part of Hollingworth.
While we have plenty of perfectly good reasons to fear teens from other countries, if we’ve learned nothing else from these last few years, it’s that old people from this country are definitely a billion times worse. Speaking for myself, I take a bit of solace in the fact that Let’s Eat Grandma have a long and prosperous career ahead of them, likely to continue well after 45 keels over mid-rage tweet, stashed in a luxury bunker half a mile below The Kremlin.
Speaking of the abyss, this show occurred on the first chilly, rainy night of fall, which perfectly suited Odetta Hartman. The NYC songster’s meld of traditionalism, modern technology, vocal daring-do, and raw showmanship instills hope that the street people might yet still reclaim the banjo from Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers. Canada’s Boniface, the other openers, would’ve fit right in on the soundtrack to HBO’s Girls, and I do not intend that statement as a complement or an insult, merely an observation based on my intuitions regarding Marnie Michaels’s musical preferences.
Photo by Barry Thompson; follow him on Twitter @barelytomson.