Teenage Granny – Glossolalia (The Harsh Sounds of the Internet) ALBUM REVIEW
Aly Cabral should be a familiar name by now to most people within and even outside of the local underground music circuit who instantly recognize her as either the frontwoman of millennial indie trendsetters Ourselves the Elves or the lead guitarist of 90’s alternative rock worshippers The Buildings. While both aforementioned bands are firmly grounded within the realm of guitar-based music, Cabral’s solo efforts under her Teenage Granny moniker find her getting into more electronic territory. However, a certain distinction has to be made between the Teenage Granny who had previously put out “Teenagegrannycore” (which this very page reviewed last year) and “2015-2017” (a 4-track EP of her songs from within that two-year period) versus the Teenage Granny who had just released “Glossolalia (The Harsh Sounds of the Internet)” a week ago. Whereas Cabral’s two previous EPs contain beat-driven songs that a substantial portion of her fanbase in any of her two main bands can easily find themselves swaying along to while happily drunk inside some dimly lit club packed full of hipsters and millennials (or both), any semblance of a beat that can make one’s head bop is totally absent in her most recent effort.
What I immediately noticed upon listening to “Glossolalia (The Harsh Sounds of the Internet)” was how Cabral seemed to have very heavily relied on some text-to-speech converter to read out data embedded in four of the most popular sites being frequented by people whenever online which also serve as the titles of the EP’s first four tracks. While slightly appreciated, I honestly think that the attempts at coaxing harsh noise sounds out of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram via databending should have been highlighted more instead. An example of why I found Cabral’s reliance on a text-to-speech converter to do the vocal work for her a bit tedious to listen to can be found starting at the 2-minute mark of the third track “YouTube” when a corporate-sounding European female voice just went on reciting all those texts, buttons and whatnot accompanying each video that YouTube displays on its home page and suggests for the currently logged in user to watch that I could almost hear crickets chirping instead of being subjected to more harsh noise. Thankfully, the almost 10-minute eponymous track that concludes Cabral’s latest EP ditches whatever text-to-speech program she used for the four tracks that preceded it and fulfills the record’s objective of capturing in audio form the assault brought about by the Internet on the senses of each and every one of its users vying for a piece of online presence and attention, so much so that putting just that single track out would have sufficed rather than adding four tracks before it that didn’t really do much. I would even dare say that “Glossolalia” sounded to me like an updated, Internet-era take on a 1987 piece from Mixed Band Philanthropist (a side project of Richard Rupenus from The New Blockaders) called “The Industry of Children and Machines”.
There seems to be little to no indication for now if Cabral would completely ditch the accessible sound of her previous works in favor of forays into sound manipulation but if she could put out another track similar to “Glossolalia” or perhaps even try her hand at channeling either Margaret Chardiet (Pharmakon) or Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota), only then could it be said that Teenage Granny’s transition from lo-fi synthpop darling to experimental sound artist is a rather interesting one and something to watch out for.
Listen to Teenage Granny’s “Glossolalia (The Harsh Sounds of the Internet)" here: https://teenagegranny.bandcamp.com/album/glossolalia-the-harsh-sounds-of-the-internet