EGG RECORDS 17th May 2024
The Lovely Eggs are a national treasure, we just don’t know it yet. Going their own way but consistently interesting and always themselves, this husband / wife team are practically a definition of what DIY is about – working up their own punky, psychedelic, personal songs and recording them in Lancaster before getting on a plane to mix them with Dave Fridman. Some years back they’d left the Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips guru a drunkenness-inspired answerphone message and, after looking their music up, he’d come on board back in 2018 for ‘This Is Eggland’.
Every time they come round this way, their gigs sell out and there’s a reason – their music is something to celebrate – perfectly itself but massively appealing. It’s a down-to-earth album, full of the detail of surviving day to day, yet hitting moments of pure transcendentalism in a psych / punk way. Holly Ross’ flat Lancastrian tones go from the challenges of daily life to the closing ‘I Am Gaia’, where emails and business become irrelevant to the feeling of immanence; of being alive to sensation; of seeing life, death and her place in it all. Dream-like music from Holly and David Blackwell – semi-mobile, semi-fixed underpins musings on the unreality of performance and the remarkable presence of her toddler blethering while Holly takes all sorts of roles in the adult world. It’s a contrast to the furious punk of where we came in, with the opening line of ‘Death Grip Kids’, “stuff your funding up your arse” (about their fight to keep the local community arts centre going – “I won’t sit around the table with you…. Just let us get on with it”.
‘My Mood Wave’, the single, is full of fuzz-tone sixties garage vibes and a stand-out, along with ‘I Don’t Fucking Know What I’m Gunna Do’ and its Blank Generation teen dumbness, ironically delivered from the parents of an eleven year old. The psychy-swirly keys and rhythms sum up the sound. The keys are a highlight on ‘People TV’, backing balladeering, and help make ‘Meeting Friends At Night’ a fidgety slice of life and fun. It’s the personal stuff that really hits home – the closing track plus ‘Echo’ – thoughtful reflections on a relationship – and the tender ‘Nothing/Everything’. In the latter, the detail of marriage is unpicked – knowing how someone feels, knowing the stains on their shitrt, everything and nothing, with a lovely organic organ sound.
Holly says: “On this album you’ll hear us at our lowest and most vulnerable. Daily life is hard. Realising everything you grew up with and loved is never coming back, alongside the responsibilities of caring for others is sometimes hard to take. The album is about life and death. Eggsistentialism. It’s about dragging yourself through all the shit to get to the other side.”
Despite this, the album is absolutely life-affirming, vitalising, packed with attitude and…. FUN.
We reviewed the last-but-one album here:
https://www.vanguard-online.co.uk/the-lovely-eggs-this-is-eggland/