The brainchild of Grand Pocket Orchestra guitarist and No Monster Club bassist Mark Chester, Ginnels is a lo-fi pop outfit completely devoid of phonic boundaries.
Opener ‘Kirkby Lonsdale’ sums the 13-tracker up in two bewildering minutes, kicking off with an orchestral hook and delicate vocal, before erupting into a perfectly painful aural shitstorm. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the seemingly arbitrary world of Mark Chester.
From here on, it’s underproduced ‘90s grooves, sunny surf-rock melodies and barely decipherable lyrics all the way. While less playful than GPO’s debut, Ginnels expresses itself in the same way as The Ice Cream, through impenetrable anarchy. Chester still harbours that great knack of setting a scene, even if the scene in question is open to interpretation. The gorgeous ‘Caribbean’, for example, fits all the criteria of a shimmering seaside number, yet the scuzzy refrain of “Carribean/ It’s so cold” gives the tune a melancholy edge. Ditto noise-pop ditty ‘Yama & Terio’, whose sinister second half could happily soundtrack a great bank heist.
You could argue that a stream of consciousness record like Ginnels can’t be all that enjoyable, but then you might also want to warn Mr Chester not to record his vocals inside a sleeping bag and not to steal his beats from a five-year-old child (just guessing). Ginnels is instantly lovable because of these freewheeling quirks, not in spite of them. Nobody goes looking for 30 minutes of urgent, animated, directionless madcappery, but when you find it, it’s a cause for celebration.