Album Review

The Garden - Haha

Item: The Garden - Haha
Rating: 3

Sadistically teasing all essences of musical genres into a 17 track debut, ‘Haha’ has more than its fair share of insanity.

Reviewer: Joanie Eaton

Released: 9th October 2015

Label: Epitaph

The Garden’s ‘Haha’ is an incomparable trip into the unknown. The identical twin brothers, Fletcher and Wyatt Shears, appear to have a knack for making commanding, innovative music that makes perfect sense and yet no sense at all, with that pattern cataclysmically spinning in circles.

The slurry, snotty vocals on first track ‘All Smiles Over Here : )’ chaotically give way to the Mighty Boosh crimp-like track of the record, ‘Everything Has A Face’. Shapeshifting into ‘Crystal Clear’, the record takes a turn for the less claustrophobic - more moody, looming and even more polished with a bass line sounds like its trudging through thick fog in a room drenched in Drenge posters.

With the huge influence of ‘90s hip hop lining the seams of ‘Jester’s Game’ and ‘Together We Are Great’, the twins pull everything off without sounding silly or forced.

The atrociously instant ‘We Be Grindin’’ sees the pair at their most bizarre. Tongue-in-cheek lyrics (“We be grindin’ up in the clubs / We be looking to get all crunk”) could easily lend itself to chart-ready EDM. If both the night out and the hangover was smushed into your brain, vomited onto a polystyrene plate of kebab and eaten up again in two minutes and eleven seconds, it would be this track. The simplicity of that against a dense, punk instrumental proves them to be a little more than style over substance. Sadistically teasing all essences of musical genres into a 17 track debut, ‘Haha’ has more than its fair share of insanity, deciphering into something chaotically enjoyable.

Tags: Album Reviews, Reviews, Epitaph, The Garden