12" Black Vinyl.
“The world is crumbling and I don’t have much to say,” sings Greta Kline, leader of the band Frankie Cosmos, on the band’s new album. It’s a striking admission in a time when everyone else seems to be playing pundit in their own teapot echo chamber. And despite specializing in gently drifty guitar-rock and singing with the kind of recessively reedy voice that usually implies a retreat into one’s interior biosphere, Klein isn’t an escapist, at least not always. “For what it’s worth,” she notes a couple songs later, “I wish I was the earth.” It turns out to be worth quite a bit. That dichotomy — between falling away from the world and wishing your way into transforming it — governs this excellent album, the best yet from an artist who’s spent the last few years on one of the more impressive songwriting binges in indie-pop.