(Both Puzzle and Wyatt’s solo endeavor, Enjoy, have generated 10+ albums themselves) He adds that his long-running solo project, Puzzle, tends to be less humor-driven. “We’ll talk about serious subjects, but it’s always woven in with humor,” he explains. That’s just who we are.” Which is not to say, as Fletcher comments, that they aren’t serious about their work. “But for us, we like to add lightheartedness to our music. “If you don’t really make art yourself you might take us as, ‘Oh they’re not taking this seriously because they’re not serious musicians that act seriously and behave seriously in their art,” says Wyatt. Just look at their titles: albums The Life and Times of a Paperclip and Kiss My Super Bowl Ring, the EP U Want the Scoop?, and tracks including “Call This # Now,” “Who Am I Going to Share All Of This Wine With?” “Clench to Stay Awake,” and “The King of Cutting Corners.” Their lyrics, whether sung, shouted, or screamed, are reliably satirical, droll, Dadaist absurd- fun. But both, to be sure, share a wicked sense of humor. Wyatt, The Garden’s bassist and more frequent lead vocalist is the louder and more exuberant of the two, given to bursts of laughter, while drummer and vocalist Fletcher is slightly more measured and deliberate. And while I do have their names in black boxes, popping up so I know who’s speaking when, I quickly realize that their speaking voices are different. The guys are in different locations–Wyatt currently lives near Long Beach, California while Fletcher, who joins us a few minutes in, after a doctor’s appointment that ran late is adjacent to downtown L.A. Here’s a tree-falls-in-the-forest-type question: When are identical twins not identical twins? How about, when you can’t see them? Here I am, getting ready for a late August Zoom call with two guys who look alike, wondering if I’ll be able to tell them apart, when I discover that we’re not doing video. Minutemen, The Strokes, Beastie Boys, B-52’s, Dublin’s Gilla Band, and many other touchstones may race through your head when listening to The Garden, and yet they really sound like no one but their vada vada selves. The band’s greatest flirtation with larger pop culture awareness came in 2017, when they opened on Mac DeMarco’s North American tour, then teamed with the beloved indie rock everyman on the sparkling 2019 one-off single “Thy Mission,” accompanied by a deranged music video set in a devil-meets-Jerry Springer-style talk show. The Garden’s sound and presence has attracted collaborations with other provocateurs over the years, from 100 Gecs’ Dylan Brady, James Bulled of Kero Kero Bonito, Le1f, and even Carrot Top. Also, they frequently perform decked out as jesters. Rip-roaring hardcore here, drum and bass grooves there, forays into rap and electronica, and unexpected stops, starts, time changes, and samples at every turn. It's precisely that kind of weirdness, with words, musical mashups, and hilariously provocative takes on the world, that has made The Garden so singular, the embodiment of “vada vada”–their own invented word for a “why not?” approach to art that dismisses rules and conventions. Twins, it seems, really can complete each other’s sentences. “Yeah, it reminds me of a word an older person might say, like, ‘Aw, horseshit!’” adds Fletcher with a laugh. “There’s some nostalgia in the word as well,” Wyatt continues. They first visited the h-word in 2018, on the guttural, emoticon-titled track “: ( ”-pronounced “sad face”–with Wyatt shout-singing, “We all make mistakes / And one of mine was putting up with the horseshit.” The boys returned to the term just last week, dropping Horseshit on Route 66, their fifth album, opening another chapter for one of the more breathtakingly original, witty and anything-goes experimentalist outfits of the past ten years. “It’s a strong word, honestly,” cosigns Fletcher Shears, his twin brother and bandmate in the wild and wooly Southern California art punk duo The Garden. “I’ve always liked the word ‘horseshit’,” declares Wyatt Shears, with all the certainty that one had better summon in making such a simple statement.
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