An excellent second LP by the wittily droll wordsmith Tom Greenhouse and band, bringing oodles of hilarious, oddball short stories and killer lines about the absurdity of life, backed by strangely wonderful post-punk and electronica. More than a match for contemporary talking equivalent Dry Cleaning, Greenhouse has been serving up this kind of superior material for years, and it was first picked up on Song Bar during first pandemic in early 2020 with the pre-first LP single, The Sticks. But here the title track, for example captures the failure to get through a series of mundane tasks, beginning with an over-tasked attempt to iron two heavily creased band branded tea towels before posting them out. It’s the daft little details that count, and those are richly observed, plentiful and always strange and unpredictable, from two packets of rotting bacon Sellotaped to the ceiling, to giving the hairdresser a box filled with woodlice as a tip.
Greenhouse is a new form of Mark E. Smith, with a similar sense of the absurd, less angry, more world weary. Opener Musicians captures a surreal process of trying to get a band together with a series of unlikely oddball encounters and characters, I Lost My Head a gentle lo-fi Velvet Underground inspired number with a dash of Jona Lewie, while the Neoprene Ravine is about a fictional sci-fi style otherworld band, complete with oddball synths and bleeps, and, no less, “the alien equivalent of the Velvet Underground”. There’s more extraterrestialisms and alien presence in strange world of Blinkus Booth in The UFOs, but perhaps the two outstanding tracks are the rather catchy Get Unjaded, a series of funny musings on attempts to be less cynical (“Well, Simon seems to have misplaced his pet lampray / His only source of intimacy throughout the whole of last year”), and Hard Rock Potato, containing many classic throwaway lines, including “It's like Windows 98 in here”, and another space reference, and yearning for more escape with “To the moon, baby / Because obviously there's no baddies on the moon.” A wonderful ironic escape from, and of course back again, to society’s infinitely stupid, but vividly rendered world. Out on Melodic Records.
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