Eggland – THE LOVELY EGGS: This is Eggland (2018)

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El último artefacto sonoro de THE LOVELY EGGS incide en la misma línea que el matrimonio Ross/Blackwell nos tiene acostumbrados: Trash-Punk-Pop, ironía y cierta mala leche para construir esos pildorazos de guitarras primitivas y primarias con ritmos contundentes. No es un álbum indispensable, pero sí adecuado para elevarnos el espíritu a base de guitarrazos.

“This Is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs’ fifth album, befits its name—it’s as good an introduction as you’ll get to the group and its charmingly skewed perspective on the world. Over the years, they’ve gotten steadily heavier, from their early acoustic style to the likes of 2015’s “Magic Onion,” eventually settling on a sound that evokes psychedelic-punk touchstones like the Buzzcocks and some of the hooky, madcap glee of Charly Bliss. Or, in Ross’ own words: “It kind of sounds like a chip shop on fire.” Credit, in part, a change in personnel. Where the group’s previous albums were self-produced,Eggland brings in Dave Fridmann, known for helping the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala scale up their psychedelia to arena levels.
It’s common to the point of cliché to have a big-name producer arrive midway through a band’s career, sand down all the lo-fi edges, and replace them with studio gimmickry. But Ross and Blackwell, ever self-aware, make their upgraded sound part of the joke. “I’m With You” introduces itself with Missile Command whirs, and “Return of Witchcraft” is slathered in guitar distortion. The whiplash left-right panning of “Hello I Am Your Sun”—the opening track, and the most psyched-out song here—feels like it’s jostling you, vigorously, into the right headspace.
The defining tone of that headspace turns out to be unrelenting, gleeful pop-punk, from the swaggering riff and stop-start structure of “Dickhead” to the deadpan delivery of “Let Me Observe” to the single “I Shouldn’t Have Said That,” which mixes Ross loud and up-front. “I shouldn’t have said that—it was evil of me!” she shouts through a megaphone-like effect, with about as much remorse asEartha Kitt. “Witchcraft” begins as a cry of joy and ends as an exorcism. “Would You Fuck” teases out a dozen or so inflections from its title, a series of increasingly wacky pulled faces. “Wiggy Giggy” does for Lancaster what the Weakerthans’ “One Great City!” did for Winnipeg. On This is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs sound like they’ve ventured out to the interplanetary shitholes of outer space and decided that the one they’ve got is quite all right” (Pitchfork)

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The Lovely Eggs: This is our nowhere (Egg Records, 2015)

Holly Ross y David Blackwell forman pareja en lo musical y en la vida normal (“lo peor de volver de gira son las tareas de casa abandonadas”). 
En la foto del cuaderno se resume brevemente el ideario musical de The Lovely Eggs. Personalmente es lo que me gusta de ellos: su absoluta independencia a la hora de componer-crear-editar sus canciones. Hacen lo que les viene en gana y no dependen de nadie a la hora de publicar sus discos: 
This is our nowhere es su cuarto trabajo, y en él han ampliado algo su visión Pop-Punk, hasta los límites del Folk digamos que “sideral” (Slinking of the strange); o el fabuloso viaje Psicodélico que es su memorable Magic onion, probablemente el corte más sobresaliente del álbum.Todo ello aderezado de esos característicos pildorazos ácido-lúdicos: Do it to me, Music, The investment, Cilla´s teeth; que es donde el dúo se encuentra más a gusto.
Y mención especial para Forest of memories, una especie de lamento melancólico y Goofin´around (in Lancashire), una preciosa canción que resume mucho de lo mejor de bandas como Throwing Muses o Breeders en menos de tres minutos.
This is our nowhere es entonces un álbum absolutamente reconocible en la trayectoria de TLE pero a la vez se convierte en su disco más evolucionado y en el que los Eggs se muestran incluso algo más libres a la hora de descubrir nuevos territorios.

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“The Lovely Eggs’ joyful live shows have made the husband-and-wife duo (guitarist Holly Ross, formerly of Leicester-based, Peel-favoured teen punks Angelica, and mop-top drummer David Blackwell) one of the country’s most beloved underground bands. The Lancaster pair’s fourth album is their most focused to date, pruning back the scattershot approach of predecessors ‘Cob Dominos’ and ‘Wildlife’ in favour of bad-trip psychedelia (‘Magic Onion’) and rolling, melancholic folk laments (‘Forest Of Memories’). The sawing chords of ‘Cilla’s Teeth’ propel Ross’ angry swipes at the mainstream (“Check your contract overleaf/You’re going to be bigger than Cilla’s teeth”). But the duo aren’t bitter and their innate good humour wins out.” (NME)

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The Lovely Eggs: Wildlife (2013)

Bajo una apariencia de gamberrismo sonoro y cierta arrogancia, The Lovely Eggs (Holly Ross, David Blackwell) son un dúo absolutamente delicioso. Su sonido tiene mucho que ver, evidentemente, con el Punk-Pop e incluso con ciertas tendencias Post-Grunge (cada vez me suenan más a Jeff the Brotherhood), pero su espíritu está más cercano al C86 o al Twee más exaltado que a otra cosa. Letras sencillas, mensajes llenos de ironía, cierta pose de arrogancia y desde luego mucho sentido del humor, que se refleja igualmente en sus videoclips.
Los petardos comienzan bien pronto, con Allergies (sí, los Eggs han ampliado su espectro sonoro…), y la cosa casi no para hasta el final, donde una maravillosa The Castle, el corte más alejado de su producción habitual, cierra este disco de dieciocho cortes que se pasan volando.
La música de estos Huevos Maravillosos es una auténtica delicia por descubrir por oídos algo más mayoritarios y debería dejar de ser una banda seminal o desde luego, alejada de circuitos Indies, al menos por estos parajes.

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“Wildlife comes in at eighteen tracks, six less than a minute long, but such is their nuts scope it maybe doesn’t matter that only half of them are more than scraps and skewed oddities. While they only really have two settings – playful fuzzy indie with faux-naive melodies or thrashy, overdriven stuttering garage rock – there’s a discreet charm and a dry, deadpan, decidedly odd Northern sense of humour that makes their style their own, sounding like they’re taking whatever approach occurs to them at the moment of recording without ever becoming self-indulgent. Take current single ‘I Just Want Someone To Fall In Love With’, which finds Ross attempting to find out if her telephone wire has been severed by birds and ending up at a reservoir (“Hydrogen and oxygen, they found the perfect match together”) with a passing tramp on a scooter which later catches fire. The track manages to come across like a primal, universal appeal for companionship, as well as an endorsement for getting drunk as a way to get over a broken heart. As far as their noisier side goes ‘I Am’ plays around with restrained grunge-era college rock dynamics which manages to hint again at loneliness and desolate feelings, the narrator comparing herself to “the worn sole on an old, old shoe”, “the last book in a library sale” and “a silence in an interview”.
Self-produced and self-recorded, this is a record with such a breadth of cock-eyed scope that it’s no wonder it takes an outside influence to bring some semblance of shape and bolster their strongest melody. Then again that outside party is the non- too-screwed-down-himself Gruff Rhys, who produced the thumping, swirling West Coast psychedelia with samples, multitracked harmonies and sitar of last year’s Too Pure Singles Club release ‘Allergies’; so it’s not as if it’s that much more nakedly commercial. Not that they’re stuck for full length ideas when left alone, ‘Green Beans’ proving that the band can carry off stripped-back blues stomping: like an early Black Keysif they ever considered writing about legumes as seduction chat-up tool. In closer ‘The Castle’ they have a end of the night moment of reflection, albeit one disrupted by Sonic Youth warming up next door. For anyone previously on board with the duo who think all this might still mean a levelling out of their individualist sense of self… well, there are also tracks called ‘Don’t Patent That Shoe’ and ‘Please Let Me Come Mooch Round Your House’.
If not entirely an approachable crossover hit for wider world consumption in waiting, Wildlife nevertheless gives hints that there’s something of depth going on behind Holly and David’s bluff obtuse facade, without punching holes in that eccentric edifice. For all the oblique matter they steadfastly refuse to be written off as a comedy indie-rock band, being as thrillingly dynamic as any more self-conscious NME prey, seeing slacker rock and emotional connectivity and treating both imposters the same” (thelineofbestfit.com)

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The Lovely Eggs: Cob dominos (2011)

 

Holly Ross y David Blackwell son un matrimonio de Lancaster, en el Reino Unido, que forman The Lovely Eggs, un ente sonoro con personalidad y vida propia desde 2006, aunque ambos tienen una carrera musical previa. The Lovely Eggs son un combo complicado de describir, a medias entre el Amateurismo y el Grunge-Pop. Sus canciones suelen tener la inmediatez del Punk-Pop más intemporal, al estilo de Helen Love (Watermelons, Don´t look at me -I don´t like it-), haciéndose acompañar de sencillas instrumentaciones y contundentes riffs de guitarra (Fuck it). En otras ocasiones, nos topamos directamente de bruces ante la ironía y la hilaridad (Panic plants, Print an imprint, Why don´t you like me?, Oregon). Otros momentos del disco son simples notas casi salpicadas en el contexto, de manera ingeniosa: I´m a journalist, Books-ting!, Alphabet song, Pets). Lo mejor de The Lovely Eggs es que son una banda que ni siquiera ellos mismos probablemente tiendan a tomársela muy en serio, aunque sus numerosas giras y sus ya dos discos grandes quieran decir lo contrario. Son algo así como el contrapunto del stablishment musical pero a la vez una formación divertida, con muchísimas ganas de pasárselo bien y de, a la vez, hacer pasar bien a todo aquel que oiga sus discos o vaya a sus conciertos.

The Lovely Eggs – Cob dominos (2011)

“And so Cob Dominos, another skewed pop missive, arrives from the planet of The Lovely Eggs and the world seems a much better place for it. I have to admit that I break into a broad smile every time an email from Holly and David arrives to keep me up to date on their latest exploits and escapades, so when I got (awfully polite) word that the Eggs had a new record on the way I couldn’t turn down the chance to let them into my life once more. And I’m so glad that I did.
What could better soundtrack the arse end of a freezing, bleak and depressing winter and the ushering in of spring than the boundless energy and enthusiasm of these grunge pop miscreants?
Who better to drag me by the scruff of my neck and yank me from my obsessive Violet Cries/Love Remains cycle (possibly licking a thumb and rubbing fiercely at some food stain or other on my cheek)? This record is the aural equivalent of a chirpy ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ Except you won’t feel the desire to lamp them.
And hey, even the Eggs aren’t afraid to look at the dark side of life. Just take the self-explanatory ‘Fuck It’, in which Holly takes a look into the void (birthday clowns and drive bys) and comes to the only conclusion that one can in these times of financial collapse and religious unrest: “Fuck it”.
A sentiment which only seems heightened by the song being followed by the frankly genius ‘Muhammad Ali’; essentially a list of every famous Ali or Alley the Eggs can think up in 13 seconds.
What really endears Cob Dominos to me however, is the way over half of the tracks on the record sound like they could be the theme song to a million imaginary mid-Eighties Sunday afternoon British sitcoms. Take ‘Panic Plants’. An ode to worry and obsessive compulsive disorders, it manages to bring memories of eating tea in front of Watching or Brushstrokes rushing back. Happier, more innocent times my friends.
Which will probably tell you that The Lovely Eggs haven’t exactly changed their MO since debut If You Were Fruit. We’re still talking jangle pop guitars and potty mouthed observations being beaten rudely but playfully around the head by crashing grunge riffs, but when the results bring earworms this fat and wrigglesome then who would want them to change?
Cob Dominos comes at you with all the child-like joie de vivre of the entire cast of Why Don’t You? on the biggest fucking sugar rush of their life and it’s impossible not to let it overpower you, scribble rude words on your face in permanent marker and leave you grinning like a twat” (drownedinsound.com)

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