Most of the time, lyric sheets to albums are utilitarian; you turn to them to make sure what you’re hearing is right. But the lyric sheet to Frankie Cosmos’ Next Thing reads like book of poems on its own. It runs seven pages long, comprising 15 stanzas (1 for each of its songs) and it totals 1570 words, all of which are slyly idiosyncratic, bordering on perfectly arranged. As I listened, I felt compelled to print them out, staple the pages together, and read along, fearful I would miss something important. As I did, I became thoroughly convinced that Greta Kline is quietly writing herself into a vaunted place, one where she will eventually deserve mention alongside poets like Lydia Davis, Wayne Koestenbaum, or Maggie Nelson—anyone who can puncture your heart in the span of a sentence.
The sound on her sophomore album is mature, fully-fleshed, but never loses the unique immediacy of her Bandcamp work. Like those albums, the music on Next Thing is mostly built on unvarnished synths and sweet, understated guitars. The difference is in the clarity of her vision: Two years ago when Lindsay Zoladz named Zentropy the year’s number one pop album in New York Magazine, she concluded that Kline penned a “melodic reminder that the wisest, wittiest person in the room is rarely the loudest one but instead that unassuming girl in the corner, grinning contentedly at her untied shoes.” In Next Thing, she’s looked up from her laces, meeting your eyes and delivering observations that are by turns strange, self-possessed, and dizzyingly multitudinous.
On these songs, those observational powers are at their height. Her greatest talent remains her ability to transform minute-long songs into experiences that resemble hours of intimate and impressionistic conversation. In the first minute of album opener “Floated In,” Kline sings: “Now it would be bedtime if/I could close off my mind/It just flops onto you/Wet and soppy glue…You know I’d love to/Rummage through your silky pink space cap.” It’s an uncanny description of two drowsy minds splattering thoughts on each other, hoping something sticks, but the words gently pass by before you’ve even internalized how weird and salient they are. Even when she paints scenes that ostensibly are filled with private meaning, something universal resonates. In “Fool” for example, when she sings “Your name is a triangle, your heart is a square,” the funky cubist formulation gets closer to the uncomfortable feeling of naming the one you love than straight description ever would.
As a singer, she’s perfected an inimitable vocal delivery that is willfully off-center, out-of-focus, and matter-of-fact. She uses enjambment in her writing and in the long pauses of her singing so well that it reminds me of an idea from Maggie Nelson, that some people who tend bonsai trees plant them askew or aslant to leave space for God. The gaps in Sappho’s poetry have been called “a free space of imaginal adventure,” and it is an apt description for Kline’s music: In the momentary disjunctions of Kline’s singing, the hiccup between words, a whole life passes by. On “Outside with the Cuties,” she savors the nanoseconds that come between words, asking ordinary-seeming questions (“I haven’t written this part yet/will you help me write it?”) that invite radical participation from a listener. Even though the song may end after two and a half minutes, it never really ends.
Her work has a continuity to it that invites deep diving, as if she is formulating and reformulating the same few thoughts, waiting for their perfect expressions. Many of the songs (“Embody,” “On the Lips,” “Too Dark” and “Sleep Song”) on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things. “Embody” finds Kline singing about a day where friendship is everything holy in the world, “It’s Sunday night/and my friends are friends with my friends/it shows me they embody all the grace and lightness.” It’s a feeling that helps her move past her self-perceived inability to access this feeling herself (“someday in bravery/I’ll embody all the grace and lightness). In Catholicism, past the fog of guilt, there’s an incredible idea that light, love, and all that’s holy can be transferable from one person to the next. It usually happens in ritual, the eating of a wafer of bread and a sip of wine. In Greta Kline’s pocket universe, all you need to get closer to heaven is a night with friends.
The Fat Angel Sings 