A household name for romantic instrument-sampling electronica as Helios, and for withdrawn piano excursions as Goldmund, Keith Kenniff has teamed up with his wife Hollie and together, as Mint Julep, the pair have released this here non-CD-R debut. Keith’s compositional touches add familiarity to Save Your Season, but as a work of hazy, shoegazey dream pop it feels initially like a departure from the slighter motions of the two above-mentioned handles. With those, his sounds involved a certain clarity of detail as well as, in the case particularly of Goldmund, a hushed intimacy. In contrast Save Your Season is thick and noisy, a chugging blur of vocals, synth and soaring guitar.
Yet Keith Kenniff’s solo music has always displayed a sentimental edge, to say the least, and herein lie the obvious similarities. Save Your Season brims with the cinematic musical tropes of youthful energy and romance. Engorged with sweetness, the songs all trundle fuzzily along, the sickly beats and Hollie’s weightless voice lending some guidance through the wash of harmonies. Successfully catchy chord sequences unfold, doing so resolutely (and perhaps tediously) well within the beaten track.
This isn’t the time for ambitious or challenging designs though - Mint Julep have Poladroided photographs and scarf-snug romances to soundtrack. The image this album cultivates certainly revels (in this reading at least) in the pretty, stylised imagery of hip modernity’s transient indulgences. It’s an airy work of nostalgic movement, committed neither fully to uplift nor to sadden but instead to wring familiar and relatable poetry of Eros and defoliation from the aesthetic reference points found in between the two. This kind of ambiguity is further supported in the (only partially discernible) lyrics. Merely to gesture is to convey without costly investment, and to be sure Hollie Kenniff ought to be forgiven not for sounding particularly emotionally invested in lines as numb as “I lie awake dreaming of landscapes in the rain” (‘Aviary’). “Please take me away from here / barricaded in our bedroom / Put your hand in mine my dear / As we watch the world disappear” she breathes on ‘No Letting Go’. Compelling evidence that halitosis is also audible.
Nevertheless I think Save Your Season is a record developed and deployed sincerely rather than cannily. It’s reasonable to imagine the duo looking back on it as a labour of love in more than one sense; a timestamp of mutual affection and collaborative enjoyment. And some of the songs are, in themselves, executed well enough. ‘To The Sea’ is the highlight, succulent and memorable. But overall there is too little to tell the tracks apart. ‘No Letting Go’ is hardly more than a heftier ‘To The Sea’. ‘Cherry Radio’ is as grotesque as its title. Add to the muddled design the evacuation of any idiosyncratic content and you almost have a carte blanche ripe and ready for fleeting appropriation by the next identity-starved reblogger.