The Cool Greenhouse: I Lost My Head – video premiere / album teaser

The Cool Greenhouse – new video and song ‘I Lost My Head’ released as teaser for forthcoming ‘Sod’s Toastie’ album out in November 2022

The Cool Greenhouse are a band for people who don’t like (99% of) music. They are a band for people who like Science Fiction, art-house films, classic foreign literature, political theory, incisive comedy. Clever bastards. Geeks with Attitude. Outcast clever-dicks. And people who haven’t been to a gig since MES died… and people with a knowing sense of absurdist humour.

The Cool Greenhouse were the first and are the best of all the current young bands who ‘sound like the Fall’. They make comedy-Fall student-fodder Yard Act look even more like a bunch of jokers – who test their jokes on focus groups made up of the gullible.

When I reviewed Alexa! by the Cool Greenhouse I said, among other things…

A lot of bands say they are influenced by the Fall – but very few get it right – get to the dark heart of the magic realism of aforementioned group. TCG do.

The forthcoming album sees the band really establish their own identity and inch further and further away from the shadow of You Know Who.

While frontman Tom Greenhouse’s off-kilter observations and bizarro anecdotes remain front and centre, this time round the band up their game with a more vigorous sound that keeps pace with Greenhouse’s wholly distinctive lyrical style. Greenhouse continues to revel in telling increasingly surreal short stories, rejoicing in the power of the deadpan one-liner and bedecking his songs with far-flung cultural references. But now the band employ a variety of techniques with improved production, from the impulsively bashed keyboards and jubilantly repetitive guitar stabs that have be-come their trademark, to flirtations with–heaven forbid! – melody, chord progressions and arrangements which elevate their tried-and-tested blueprint into a more exciting and cohesive whole.

I have heard the whole of Sod’s Toastie and it is a work of some genius. It’s funny and dark, clever and silly. musically astute and still at times infuriating…. full review to follow, but in the meantime…

I Lost My Head also adopts a jangle-pop sheen with a luscious synth melody, as the frontman ditches the spoken-word for a surly croon (his first known attempt at actual singing!).

The video was painstaking crafted in stop/motion animation by Kev from the band.

The song is somehow a bizarre classic with echoes of Syd Barrett in the vocal and the Modern Lovers musically. It is absurd, surreal, nonsensical but brings to mind Spike Milligan, Monty Python (it starts with ‘And now, for something completely different’) the early Reeves & Mortimer as well as Edward Lear & Lewis Carroll.

That is before we take into account….

…and…

The Cool Greenhouse – are the best outsider band around. Most people will hate them – but the Hip Geeks know they are the best.

The Cool Greenhouse Link-Tree  – includes videos, pre-order album and gig tickets

Tour Dates // January 2022

19th – Bodega, Nottingham
20th – Yes (Pink Room), Manchester
21st – Stereo, Glasgow
22nd – Harmonium, Edinburgh
25th – The Exchange, Bristol
26th – Studio 9294, London
27th – Patterns, Brighton

All words Ged Babey with press release content in italics.

Source: louderthanwar.com