Amanda Palmer tweeted something a while back about how she was producing an album for another artist, a band called "Evelyn Evelyn". I remember thinking, "That's cool, I'll look into that at some point, but... being produced by Amanda Palmer doesn't mean its necessarily awesome."
And oh, how wrong I was.
After listening to and loving their first song, I read this bio from their myspace:
Evelyn and Evelyn Neville are a songwriting duo performing original compositions on piano, ukulele, guitar and accordion. The sisters are parapagus tripus dibrachius twins, sharing three legs, two arms, three lungs, two hearts and a single liver.
"No way," I thought. "Seriously?"
I poked around the interwebs a bit more. Sources supported the story. My beloved Palmer and co-producer Jason Webley supposedly discovered the pair, who were working as circus performers prior to their musical career. I was starting to fall for it when I discovered an article somewhere ruining the fun of the hoax: Evelyn and Evelyn are (SPOILER) Palmer and Webley with one hand tied behind their backs, in a giant dress.
The full album can be streamed from the myspace (although I want to buy one cause I totally support this weird project). It's a concept album, telling a gruesome, creepy, and at times very funny story of this duo's wildly eventful and fantastical upbringing, all leading up to the day they discovered how to upload songs to myspace.
The songs are eclectic, spanning all kinds of genres and moods, sampling many bizarre flavours of music, but always with that twisted vibe in the background that accompanies Palmer's work. (I can't vouch for Webley, I hadn't heard anything of his prior to this, but he seems incredibly talented in his own right) Some I like a lot more than others (which is inevitable when your album crosses so many stylistic borders) but what fascinates me the most is the viral hoax used to publicize it, and how it involves the reader in the story. This album wickedly and perceptively manipulates our modern brains and entrenches itself in the smoke and mirrors of our digitized, media-centric world.
So, I'm going to write a proper analysis of it, something that I could have handed in in my pop culture class (although I'll probably swear more than I did for that class. Swearing is inevitable, unless I have a really, really good reason not to.) Just to avoid a monster blog, I'll use this one for backstory and save the essay for the next post.
Hey, remember when this blog was for poetry? I gotta get back to that at some point.
While you're waiting to pretend to read my pop-cultural analysis (which will be no doubt very long winded and of interest only to myself) why not check out the album here: http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn
(if you scroll down past the concert dates, to the second "play" box, you can listen to the whole album. The first one only has 3 songs)
Remain awesome until I see you next.
-L
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