The Cool Greenhouse unveiled their debut self-titled album last week to seemingly universal acclaim, and rightly so – it’s packed with intertwining motorik riffs, crisp drumming and meandering lo-fi keys, over which frontman Tom Greenhouse’s idiosyncratic vocals that verge from the topical to the surreal, often in the same sentence. We caught up with the band for a track by track tour of a record that takes us from trolling horses to explorations in Virtual Reality to Maggie Thatcher’s living room.
THE STICKS is a schizoid paranoia epic. A WARNING re: your move to pastoral Tory environs with too little to do. Take Heed! It was recorded live with whiskey @ 4am post late night band trip to cinema.
CARDBOARD MAN = zinger-replete dig at the gammon classes + vocalist’s mum. In GUM you look back on what was once a tantalising start to life and wonder what the hell happened. God knows what
LIFE ADVICE is about — some sort of pale joke?
In DIRTY GLASSES loathsome M.T bangs head against walls as band set up as window-washer entrepreneurs [REVEAL: this music is business-savvy PR stunt only to drum up punters].
In TROJAN HORSE the protagonist comes to realise that the entirety of mundane reality is only a Truman Show-style TRAP, only without cameras & without audience & without HOPE.
SMILE, LOVE! is a piece of catchy virtue-signalling in the POP style re: a lady who gets harrassed by a prick horse.
4 CHAN then is futuristic attempt at hi-tech musical VR in which listener is subsumed by the incel comment-section power trip dream & eventually recovers.
I have it on good authority that PROSPECTS is in the voice of a 28-year-old forced by unmeetable rents to return tale between legs to the small home of his cat-breeding mother and live among more than forty cats with NO PROSPECTS of love nor money.
In OUTLINES your relationship disintegrates, you spiral inward & start making faces out of wood-chip patterns.
THE SUBLETTERS PART TWO (Featuring The Shifters) continues the narrative of PART ONE (as yet unheard). It was devised between continents using computers by the band (who wrote the lyrics and embellished the music) and Miles (who wrote the backbones of the music), which is really pretty clever. And then it’s done. But the good thing about these records is you can play them again if you want.
Introduction by Paul Maps
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