Martin Creed – Love To You (Moshi Moshi)

4 stars
It’s de rigeur for Turner Prize winners to play in bands these days, 
and anyone familiar with Martin Creed’s oeuvre from his 2010 Edinburgh 
Art Festival show at the Fruitmarket Gallery and accompanying live 
song-and-dance routine at the Traverse will know what to expect from 
this most calculated of borderline autistic, OCD auteurs. To whit, in 
this pre-Olympic run-up to orchestrating all the bells in the country 
to ring out for three minutes, Creed thrashes out eighteen miniatures 
of love and hate that fuse the desperate yearning of playwright Sarah 
Kane and the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca with the DIY 
messthetics of Swell Maps and the brattish cartoon petulance of Jilted 
John.

Bookended by ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, which sound-tracked the Fruitmarket lift’s 
rise and fall, Love To You is a bumpy thirty-seven minute and nine 
second ride through the confessional ups and downs of fatal attraction, 
obsession, rejection, frustration and apparent acceptance. If ‘1234’ 
and ‘Fuck Off’ strip the concept of a love song to its bare bones and 
machine-gun it into Billy Childish-style garage-band submission, ‘I 
Can’t Move’ and the title track are prom-night paeans to Creed’s object 
of desire, girly harmonies and all on an insistently honest heart-to 
heart in which opposites attract in not-so-perfect symmetry.  

The List, June 2012

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