The Thekla, 18th October 2022
Closer to watching performance art than a concert, Let’s Eat Grandma’s anarchic, feral approach to making music has them crawling on all fours, experimenting in real time in their pursuit to be watched.
It’s a surprise, when one is used to listening to them through one’s headphones, how unexpectedly frantic they are live. They flip between singing in their bedrooms and walking in graveyard-shift trances. It’s all chaos, but the best kind of it.
Perhaps their most moving song – and the sincerest performance to watch – is ‘Watching You Go’, which chronicles Hollingworth’s grief after the death of her boyfriend, Billy Clayton. It’s where the band’s beating heart pulsates past mere electric brainwave. They drape over themselves and each other. They sparkle under the lights like dayglow.
Their moods are at once flimsy and tipsy, heavy and dark. One could be happy or inside Heartbreak Hotel, but Let’s Eat Grandma can – and do – provide the soundtrack. It may be erratic and eccentric, strange or shallow, but there’s a precision in their chaos that can set the world to rights.
Their penultimate song is ‘I Really Want to Stay at Your House’, which has just reached virtual acclaim after its use in the video game Cyberpunk 2077. People are surprised that it’s played, as it was created by Walton as a side project. The fact that even the song is shared with the band – and with their fans – shows how deeply friendship and collaboration are bitten into the core of their art.
Far from a typical gig, Let’s Eat Grandma provide a fresh lens to see the world through. Childlike, unpolished, and kinetic, it’s a kaleidoscopic document.
Their performance is highly visual, and totally illusory. Two ghosts singing in time with an irregular heartbeat. Two witches dancing on their day off.
@katejeffrie 
@ilnsimages
