FRANKIE COSMOS - Vessel

Being alive

Matters quite a bit

Even when you

Feel like shit

Being alive

(from “Being Alive”)

No point beating around the bush: Greta Kline has fooled us again. We thought we'd learned to be wary of her sugary bedroom indie-pop, of the urgency of mini-songs that got straight to the point in a handful of seconds, of her songwriting halfway between committed introspection and calculated nonchalance. Instead, here we are, greeting with curiosity the arrival of “Vessel”, the third record under the Frankie Cosmos name, and the first for Sub Pop. If you still don't know her, Greta Kline is a twenty-four-year-old American with short hair and a weighty surname, an electric guitar perennially slung under her arm, and an out-of-the-ordinary talent.

After an endless string of releases on Bandcamp (her Wikipedia page makes it clear, the list is truly long), her artistic trajectory has led her to package her anti-folk vignettes into two albums, “Zentropy” and “Next Thing”, which outline Frankie Cosmos's artistic manifesto rather well. And “Vessel”, in its scant forty minutes, does nothing but confirm it. A springlike, bittersweet album, dotted with little guitar notes that rarely run past the two-minute mark, with an oblique attitude that draws as much on the dry, outsider mood of Daniel Johnston as on the stars-and-stripes feminine touch of Courtney Barnett. Songs with a vaguely cinematic gait, perfect soundtracks for first loves more or less requited, for every adolescence that, to quote three of our cheerful friends, “coincides with war”.

It must be said that, compared to the recent past, there are no major innovations in style or form. There are taut, almost garage-adjacent moments (“Cafeteria” and the adorable electric ups and downs of “Being Alive”), and no shortage of sunshine-pop sketches as poppy as can be (the guitar-tipped gait of “Ballad of R & J”, the sweet sixties-style backing vocals of a “Duet” that draws heavily on the songbook of Best Coast). Much more often, Greta's excursions resolve into reflections, at times painful and melancholy, on herself and the world around her, as in “Jesse” (“I like to be a shadow in a shadow/ more deep when visible than invisible”) or in “Same Thing” (“Nothing is deserved/ nothing is earned/ like the pillow’s cold side”).

In any case, beyond the individual tracks, what unites the eighteen songs on “Vessel” essentially boils down to two things: Kline's voice, at times angelic, a bit naïve but never truly fragile, and the carefree sense of freedom of the best indie-pop flying the DIY flag. Nothing new on the horizon, but given a quality level well above that of her direct competitors, for now that can be enough.

There's no telling what the future holds for young Greta: she certainly has the right stuff, and provided she has the courage to take more risks in the years to come, she can only get better. More than a pass.

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13/04/2018