With Bandcamp as their roadmap to discovery and YouTube as their confessional, artists like Soccer Mommy, Clairo, and Jay Som represent a new breed of bedroom-pop musician: introverts who sing confessional lyrics into their Macbooks while turning hazy guitar melodies into earworms. And at first, @, the duo of Philadelphia guitarist Victoria Rose and Baltimore musician Stone Filipczak, appear to fall into that camp as well. As artists destined to collaborate but separated by 100 miles of highway, they swapped song ideas over iMessage before deciding to join forces—virtually, of course—to record a joint album from their respective bedrooms. But in sound, their music has an old-school feel rooted in acoustic guitar and rich vocal harmonies, sounding a little like ’70s-inspired teens hung up on the Mamas & the Papas. Originally released in 2021 and now reissued by Carpark, @’s debut full-length, Mind Palace Music, offers a tidy half hour of raw folk-pop straight from the heart.
The most striking quality of @’s music is also the most human one: their voices. The imperfectness of their singing is akin to Animal Collective’s exuberant tone on Sung Tongs, or the pristine vocal harmonies of girl groups like the Chordettes or the Ronettes if somebody slid them a glass of scotch to take the edge off. Filipczak enunciates each word and sings with a slight, high-pitched lilt that, in flashes, recalls John Lennon, giving a song like “Major Blue Empty” the uncanny air of a Beatles demo. Rose counterbalances with a warm, pure timbre, and the urgency of her delivery resembles emotions bubbling up. Compared to her solo work as Brittle Brian, particularly last year’s Biodiesel, she sounds unburdened as she draws out notes in “Star Game” or “My Garden.” The duo’s vocal harmonies are at once full bodied and delicate, off-key and in tune, merry and forlorn. On the opening “Parapet,” Rose and Filipczak’s evocative vocal harmonies are paired with fluttering piano in a way that perfectly captures the visceral feel of relentless longing.
At a time when most bedroom pop feels tethered to the online world, @ are making music that cuts the ethernet cable, no matter what their alias and origins might suggest. Each instrument on Mind Palace Music sounds well loved from years of jamming, lending the album an intimacy akin to the quiet sounds of a friend performing a song just for you: the buzz of a string vibrating against a fret, the hum of a microphone turning on, the tingle on the back of your neck when two voices intertwine. That human touch is audible in the spritely acoustic guitar and soft thumps of bongos on “Letters,” or the even-keeled flute in “First Journal.” Though the influence of cult favorite Vashti Bunyan is audible on the album’s best single, “Friendship Is Frequency,” the rustic tone of the duo’s guitar and Irish low whistle adds a personable, left-field signature of their own.
Mind Palace Music is an example of what happens when you take a poignant songwriter who’s careful about her chord progressions and introduce a fellow songwriter who knows the magic of no-frills arrangements. By the time Rose and Filipczak add more instruments into the mix, @ bloom into a kind of backyard folk-pop fit for Elephant 6. The album’s longest track, “Camera Phone,” begins quietly before evolving into a spontaneous flash of prog-rock complete with MIDI erhu. “My Garden” follows a similar trajectory, but this time Rose’s vocal cadence plays with meter to fake the dizzying effect of a shifting time signature. Even the driving percussion in standout “Cut From Toxic Cloth” can’t derail the intimate charm of @’s pop tendencies. “I don’t want intensity, no/Just a way to warmth and amity,” sings Rose. That’s exactly what the band finds on its humble debut.
