Greta Kline’s early work as Frankie Cosmos earned the New York songwriter a reputation as a dazzling twee prodigy, a teenager who deftly encapsulated the weighty uncertainties of humanity in two-minute bites of melody. On her EP Fit Me In, the followup to 2014’s breakout album Zentropy, she mocked her own press coverage, which seemed more preoccupied with her age then her work: “Have you heard? I am so young.” Every Frankie Cosmos album since has felt like an attempt to take stock of what transpired since Kline’s last release, with moving meditations on touring, friendships, and the alienation of being a public-facing figure keen on safeguarding her private life. On Close It Quietly, her fourth studio LP and second Sub Pop release, she gamely stares down her middle twenties, that messy period where one’s early projections about the future tend to start unraveling.
Kline’s language has always been the tightly coiled heart of her work, and here she offers a wealth of indelible imagery that smears together the winsome and the grotesque. “Spit out diamonds/Cough up rubies,” she sings blithely on the chorus to “Windows,” a beguiling couplet that offers no window onto her interior state. The song’s peppy, full-band instrumentation recedes at the hook, an inversion of typical power-pop song dynamics—the synthesizers melt away and Kline’s voice darkens, supported by little but the tick of a cymbal.
“I wanna give you all my marbles,” she offers over a spare fingerpicked guitar on “Marbles,” twisting an old phrase until it becomes an expression of generosity rather than instability: If she’s going to lose her marbles, she might as well give them away. On “So Blue,” she envisions a cheery sky soaking the whole world in its melancholic hue (blue’s only a happy color when it doesn’t touch the ground). And with “A Joke,” Kline enlists wildflowers in an embrace of her own chaos: “Flowers don’t grow/In an organized way/Why should I?” She observes a field of dandelions and then pans down to where they’re strangling the soil, imbuing a well-worn image with new ferocity.
Listening to Frankie Cosmos, I hold up the person I was at 19 and the one I was at 25, a six-year chasm full of molting and tumult that the first self never could have foreseen. I had a good sense of self in my late teens, and then I shed it, and shed what replaced it. Kline wades fearlessly into that process of continual unearthing, casting off what used to make sense and what doesn’t anymore—old relationships, old habits, old vantages on a world that grows more complex by the day. Close It Quietly is honest about the pain of rebirth, but it doesn’t dwell there. Kline’s more interested in what grows out of that mess.
Buy: Rough Trade
