by Elise Barbin (@elisecbarb)
The Cool Greenhouse’s self-titled LP presents a series of nightmarish vignettes and seedy character studies to reveal the faux-idyllicism of provincial life. Setting aside their debts to many a punk predecessor with tightly wound arrangements and wry delivery, the band succeeds in crafting a matching sonic space to the album’s uncanny and foreboding lyrical world, where the true strength of their debut lies.
Compared to their albeit charming early recordings, outfitted with a sole guitar and a busted out drum machine, the Greenhouse’s newly minted five-piece approach creates more depth and contributes to a tactile grotesqueness. Each layer of instrumentation, slogging and dissonant, adheres another decoupaged coat of dread. Errant synth signals and short circuits of repetitious riffs lend a feeling of omnipresent surveillance.
Side one track one “The Sticks” pits narrator versus his setting, a seemingly perfect breeding ground for anxiety rife with caballing locals, suspect wiretapping work, and mysterious, toxic plants. Between surrealer songs like the treacherous chronicle “Life Advice” and the fugue state fever dream “Outlines,” any attempt to discern reality from fabrication is ambiguous at best. Tom Greenhouse, group namesake and vocalist, utilizes this high voltage paranoia as a rhetorical device to incite skepticism and invite listeners to discern their own truth.
Like the crunchy viscerality of a Cronenberg film or an absurd and vile Burroughs novel, the record is a psychedelic exercise in making the absolute low of lows tangible in exchange for an understanding of something larger. Here, enduring the trappings of small town life brings clarity to the evils of another Conservative utopia: the dregs of Capitalism. The Cool Greenhouse is not quite a rallying call for change, but an awareness campaign of how much weirder and worse things can get if the powers that be don’t get checked.