“Have you ever heard?” Greta Kline as soon as sang, “I’m so younger.” However alas, that was a decade in the past, when the younger New York Metropolis songwriter received caught fielding the media’s fixation on her age as she shot from importing lo-fi demos to Bandcamp to being a real DIY-pop icon. Since then, the method of getting older has change into a throughline in her songs, as Frankie Cosmos—maybe nowhere extra clearly than on Totally different Speaking, her sixth correct full-length, a tribute to holding your youthful self with you as you develop. “I’m older now than earlier than,” she sings softly on “Wonderland,” towards the album’s finish, “Extra strong now than earlier than… I do know myself much more.”
The self-knowledge Kline confesses on Totally different Speaking comes courtesy of collaboration. Kline has carried out and made information with a full band prior to now, however right here, Alex Bailey, Hugo Stanley, and Katie Von Schleicher helped organize and produce the tracks as a very cohesive unit, not as equipment to a solo undertaking. They made the document in an upstate New York home over 40 days—the primary self-produced Frankie Cosmos document since Kline’s teenage DIY period. “Tomorrow” looks like a bridge to these early, uncomplicated Frankie Cosmos tracks: strummy guitars and a wistful vocal melody (plus a reference to Kline’s beloved late canine, Joe Joe, a fixture in her songs), rendered in a crisper, clearer definition. However a lot of the document sounds extra like a scaled-up crew effort. “Your Take On” teeters near eruption, like a minimalist pop tackle a thrashing full-band rock track; “Wonderland” rides a syncopated rhythm and a grooving bassline; “Towards the Grain” ends with pulsing, warbling layers of synth and guitars. The document is punctuated by winking particulars, just like the squawking guitar riffs that dot “Porcelain” or the best way the psych-lite “Joyride” fades out like a tape participant powering down.
Totally different Speaking doesn’t stray from Frankie Cosmos’ predilection for brief songs—solely two tracks of its 17 go the two-and-a-half-minute mark—however Kline and the band make every really feel like a universe in miniature. The timeline of her lyrics zooms out, marking time via the markers of gentrification you may’t keep away from for those who stick round any metropolis lengthy sufficient. “Unrecognizable road,” she mourns on “Porcelain,” “With a forehead salon the place previously/Vacancy reigned.” In the direction of the album’s finish, she lists some banal however inevitable disappointments of her hometown: “Rattling this metropolis,” she sings, “All the pieces’s a pothole or a restaurant/And smells like pot.” However then, the track turns from jaded indignation in the direction of quiet appreciation: “My loss isn’t all people’s loss,” she admits, earlier than admiring the iridescence of a sundown.
