FRANKIE COSMOS - Different Talking

Greta Kline's albums under the name Frankie Cosmos are always a welcome opportunity to make peace with indie-rock. The charming miniatures and the scant thirty-eight minutes of knowing riffs and melodies that are caressing but never cloying on the new album are a further addition to what the New York singer-songwriter has already written.

Credit must be given to "Different Talking" for managing to offer a more convincing and cohesive sampler than what she's expressed in the past. At the same time, the running times - ranging from the minute and thirty-six seconds of "Not Long" to the roughly two minutes and thirty seconds of many of the compositions (note that two tracks clock in around two minutes and forty-six seconds) - are no limit to Kline's inventive power-pop nature.

Maybe it's having crossed the threshold of thirty, or the tighter synergy with the rest of the band, but the new Frankie Cosmos album (having gone from moniker to a genuine band by now) holds a range of emotional states that smell of fleeting lightheartedness and naive awareness ("Pressed Flowers").

The pop-soul cadences of the single "Vanity" are a successful concentrate of winsome melodies and crowd-pleasing choruses, the melancholy stirring through "Bitch Heart" is the result of snapshots captured with an old polaroid, and even the shoegaze leanings of "Tomorrow" express regret but without anger.

The jangle-pop nature lends lightness and a hint of that sense of wonder that pop music's eternal Peter Pans manage to preserve into old age. How else to explain the sixties drive of "Your Take On", the surf-beat streak of "Porcelain", the purely indie-pop identity of "One Of Each", the psychedelic shiver of "Joyride". These are the songs of a songwriter who refuses to grow up without holding on to her dreams and a touch of healthy madness.

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22/07/2025