Frankie Cosmos: Different Talking Album Review – Warungku Terkini

“Have you heard?” Greta Kline once sang, “I am so young.” But alas, that was a decade ago, when the young New York City songwriter got stuck fielding the media’s fixation on her age as she shot from uploading lo-fi demos to Bandcamp to being a genuine DIY-pop icon. Since then, the process of aging has become a throughline in her songs, as Frankie Cosmos—perhaps nowhere more clearly than on Different Talking, her sixth proper full-length, a tribute to holding your younger self with you as you grow. “I’m older now than before,” she sings softly on “Wonderland,” toward the album’s end, “More solid now than before… I know myself even more.”

The self-knowledge Kline confesses on Different Talking comes courtesy of collaboration. Kline has performed and made records with a full band in the past, but here, Alex Bailey, Hugo Stanley, and Katie Von Schleicher helped arrange and produce the tracks as a truly cohesive unit, not as accessories to a solo project. They made the record in an upstate New York house over 40 days—the first self-produced Frankie Cosmos record since Kline’s teenage DIY era. “Tomorrow” feels like a bridge to those early, uncomplicated Frankie Cosmos tracks: strummy guitars and a wistful vocal melody (plus a reference to Kline’s beloved late dog, Joe Joe, a fixture in her songs), rendered in a crisper, clearer definition. But much of the record sounds more like a scaled-up team effort. “Your Take On” teeters close to eruption, like a minimalist pop take on a thrashing full-band rock song; “Wonderland” rides a syncopated rhythm and a grooving bassline; “Against the Grain” ends with pulsing, warbling layers of synth and guitars. The record is punctuated by winking details, like the squawking guitar riffs that dot “Porcelain” or the way the psych-lite “Joyride” fades out like a tape player powering down.

Different Talking doesn’t stray from Frankie Cosmos’ predilection for short songs—only two tracks of its 17 pass the two-and-a-half-minute mark—but Kline and the band make each feel like a universe in miniature. The timeline of her lyrics zooms out, marking time through the markers of gentrification you can’t avoid if you stick around any city long enough. “Unrecognizable street,” she mourns on “Porcelain,” “With a brow salon where formerly/Emptiness reigned.” Towards the album’s end, she lists some banal but inevitable disappointments of her hometown: “Damn this city,” she sings, “Everything’s a pothole or a restaurant/And smells like pot.” But then, the song turns from jaded indignation towards quiet appreciation: “My loss isn’t everybody’s loss,” she admits, before admiring the iridescence of a sunset.