You can’t go far wrong appealing to the intelligentsia with your music. Well, you can, but Gretel Hänlyn doesn’t with “Head Of The Love Club” being less about stylistic beard scratching superiority and more about getting smarter than average sentiments out of her lyrics and into the part of your brain that can still process things that haven’t been actively sold to you.
“Head Of The Love Club” therefore utilises the disguise of dark pop ditties driven by looped minimalism that are combined with an, almost oblique, quirkiness that allows Gretel Hänlyn to seem like the saviour of bedsit dystopia. Her reflections on the curiosities of existence would be unlikely candidates for big band orchestration yet she still brings a curious spaciousness to her elegantly ring fenced songs with the result, however, never being oppressive as she has the poetic power to lift her songs of substance out of the shadows and into the sunlight where they rightfully belong.
Maybe literacy will survive into the twenty first century after all so I call her name for I am a believer. Yes, I am.
The album is available from Bandcamp and the usual digital locations.