- It’s not merely a well-documented fact that Wyatt and Fletcher Shears, the Orange County’s most lauded pair of esoteric, inexplicable, Ralph Lauren-modeling identical twins, live firmly within the comfortable confines of their own uncomfortable universe. It’s pretty much the basis of their entire creative rationale. They claim, quite rightly, to have invented a genre / aesthetic called “Vada Vada”, which they describe as “an idea that represents pure creative expression, disregarding all previously made genres and ideals.” If to you that sounds like the work of a pair of bored, stubborn, overgrown toddler brothers, you probably won’t like the music.

Their first album was called The Life And Times Of A Paperclip; it consists of sixteen tracks, and is shorter than an episode of Two Broke Girls. Its follow-up, Haha, is similarly twisted, but feels as much like a departure as a band like The Garden could deliver. Here, they’re much less religiously devoted to their foundational bass, drums, and vocals formula, and seem to have branched out a bit more into the other realms that Vada Vada apparently has to offer. There are electronics, synths, more effects and overdubbing, and some rhythmic ideas that’d feel more at home on a Planet Mu release. And you can notice all of it really early on, in bemusing tracks like Jesters Game and Everything Has A Face.

This change of scenery is completely beneficial, because the record is at its most enjoyable and intriguing when they’re exploring it. With The Garden, the only thing it’s all really “about” is the joy of just coming up with stuff. It’s an internal, inexplicable process that is, obviously, being externalised, and externalised with a lot of effort and intent at that, but should not ever really be explained. That would only make it less fun for everyone. It should only be experienced; where to go from there is totally up to you. The most extreme examples of this at work, like This Could Build Us A Home, Egg, and Together We Are Great, are tracks that just can’t really be genrefied. And that’s their achievement – establishing radical newness at any cost.

So without wanting to appoint this music to some kind of opinion-derived cultural allocation that will ultimately give us nothing, or apply a wankerific theoretical perspective to what is basically a project founded on spur-of-the-moment, vibe-driven, don’t-talk-about-it-too-much creativity, The Garden basically resemble hardcore Surrealists, as much anyone is currently able or game enough to, in an age when most of that movement’s principles are kind of outdated, and unfairly made irrelevant by the way the set-up of contemporary life ensures that we’re more constantly than ever affronted by shit – pure shit – for the majority of our waking lives. Or, as they quip in Haha’s title track: “I just wanted to try something so mysterious.”

- Joe Saxby.