The self-titled debut from Evelyn Evelyn, the conjoined twins singing sensation!

Okay, yeah, so in reality they aren't twins... or conjoined... or sisters... or even named Evelyn. Makes no difference to me.  This is very probably the most quirky, creative, and clever concept album I've ever listened to. In many ways I felt like I was hearing the soundtrack to a strangely beautiful stage musical, except that there is no stage musical (yet). What you hear is what you get and it's sheer brilliance.
Evelyn Evelyn consists of two musicians and singers: Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley. People may be familiar with Palmer through her Boston-based cabaret-punk band The Dresden Dolls or through her solo work. Webley is an alternative folk singer from Seattle. Both performers have a taste for the theatrical, obviously, and a penchant for experimental musical efforts. Yet nothing that's come before could have prepared me for the originality or the audacity of Evelyn Evelyn.

Their debut album is a 12 track masterpiece featuring eleven original works and a melancholic folk cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". The songs shift in mood, tone, and genre with skill and intelligence from the patently absurd "Chicken Man" to the epically moody "Sandy Fishnets" to the strange country tune "You Only Want Me 'Cause You Want My Sister". The lyrics throughout are either mockingly melodramatic or irreverently humorous and full of the unexpected rhymes and double entendres which will have you laughing with maddening delight.

Thematically, the album is all over the place and the story it has to tell is simultaneously tragic, hilarious, and ingenious! It tells the story of an unlucky set of conjoined twins who go from being orphaned on the day of their birth (mother died in labor and father was accidentally killed by a chainsaw when the eccentric doctor decided to separate the twins... unsuccessfully). The twins go from being adopted by an eccentric chicken breeder who keeps them in a cage to being sold to a woman who takes fetish photography of children to then being sent to the circus before finally ending up as internet celebrities after they record a song and post it on MySpace. Along the way they meet a variety of lunatics and eccentrics of every sort and discover how hard it is to be born as freaks of nature. The continual squabbling between them provides for a great deal of humor, as does the whole story, though it does have moments of genuine drama and emotional sincerity.


And that's not all folks, there's even a graphic novel!