Frankie Cosmos – Vessel (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Frankie Cosmos – Vessel (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 33:27 minutes | 584 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Indie Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sub Pop Records

Daughter of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates – dare we remind readers of her songParadise? –  Greta is making the most of her youth with her indy rock and delicate,roguish folk. Early on, under the alias Ingrid Superstar, she put her compositions up on Bandcamp, where there are hundreds of her compositions. After that, she played guitar for the Porches, although since Slow Dance in the Cosmos they have grown apart. Prolific from a young age and accumulating stage names, it was as Frankie Cosmos that she released her first album, at the age of 19. This third album, Vessels, marks a new page in this intimate diary, made up of simple and stark songs that she sings in her frail but mutinous voice.

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Frankie Cosmos – Close It Quietly (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Frankie Cosmos – Close It Quietly (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 39:38 minutes | 433 MB | Genre: Indie Pop, Lo-Fi
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sub Pop Records

Close It Quietly is a continual reframing of the known. It’s like giving yourself a haircut or rearranging your room. You know your hair. You know your room. Here’s the same hair, the same room, seen again as something new. Close It Quietly takes the trademark Frankie Cosmos micro-universe and upends it, spilling outwards into a swirl of referentiality that’s a marked departure from earlier releases, imagining and reimagining motifs and sounds throughout the album. The band’s fourth studio release is a manifestation of their collaborative spirit: Greta Kline and longtime bandmates Lauren Martin (synth), Luke Pyenson (drums), and Alex Bailey (bass) luxuriated in studio time with Gabe Wax, who engineered and co-produced the record with the band. Recording close to home- at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios- grounded the band, and their process was enriched by working closely with Wax, whose intuition and attention to detail made the familiar unfamiliar and allowed the band to reshape their own contexts.

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Frankie Cosmos – Inner World Peace (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Frankie Cosmos – Inner World Peace (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 36:45 minutes | 679 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Bedroom Pop, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sub Pop Records

Following the release of 2019’s Close It Quietly — Frankie Cosmos’ second album for Sub Pop and second as an official four-piece — the COVID-19 pandemic found bandleader Greta Kline sheltering in place with her parents in Upstate New York. She didn’t meet up with her band again for nearly 500 days, during the span of which Kline penned around 100 songs. Several of the 15 that made the cut for third Sub Pop outing Inner World Peace are steeped in uncertainty about the future, including some that directly address life as a musician. Driving rocker “Magnetic Personality,” for instance, includes the lines “I don’t still play the guitar every day/Ask me how I am/And I won’t really say.” Elsewhere, she reassures herself on “Empty Head” that “It’s okay not to sing a song about everything all the time,” while “Spare the Guitar” calmly prophesizes her own death. Recorded in Brooklyn with co-producers Katie von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn, Inner World Peace is also daunted musically, with conspicuous psychedelic and ’70s pop/rock influences that, while perhaps not unprecedented in the project’s prolific catalog, have never as thoroughly defined the tone of an album. The warped guitar pitches, strutting bass, and spacey keys of “Aftershook,” for example, set a Halloween-friendly mood between brisker segments of punchy indie pop. “F.O.O.F.” (“freak out on Friday”) seems to bridge modern guitar pop, prog-rock, and retro sunshine pop thanks in part to its lilting double-tracked lead vocal, fuzzy guitar tones, and breezy backing vocals. With the exception of the over-five-minute, tempo-shifting “Empty Head,” the songs here are still short and bittersweet and still distinctly Frankie Cosmos, but there’s a little less bounce in their gait and more weight to them on the whole, as Kline negotiates self-examination, affection, regret, and apprehension. As she sings on the reflective “Street View,” “I was making such progress/Now there’s new stuff to process.” – Marcy Donelson

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