Towards the end of her third studio album, Vessel, Greta Kline articulates the philosophy of her current self in 13 words: “I wasn’t built for this world/I had sex once, now I’m dead.” Kline has always written with an inspiring economy of language—such as on the 2012 collection much ado about fucking and the many elegies for her deceased dog, JoJo—which seems to honor the Yeats maxim that “sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.” But she bests herself here, on the deceptively sunny “Cafeteria.” And brutal as Kline’s epiphany may be, it contains the promise of accruing years and experience: knowing oneself. It’s a moment of pure self-possession among all the distressing frayed edges that make up your early 20s.
The 24-year-old Kline has become known as no less than a savior of indie pop and the poet laureate of New York City DIY. With wry minimalism and a voice both cherubic and droll, Kline shows that we feel the depths of the city in a granular way—like in the small defeat of swiping an empty MetroCard, or the tiny victory of ascending a platform just as the train arrives. Since the turn of the decade, Kline has taken this idea and shaped it into hundreds of cleverly-arranged pop miniatures, strummed into Garageband and posted to Bandcamp like an infinite diary. She made the twee stylings of her K Records forebears feel like a folk form. And within this humble framework, she conveyed humor, anguish, desire, sensitivity, grace, and not a tinge of eccentricity. (“Be normal, Frankie/Be normal,” goes one of her greats.) Her self-reflexive web of recurring characters, like JoJo, made the world of Frankie Cosmos feel much bigger than any one album.
Vessel edits the script a bit. If there was a reportorial flair to Frankie Cosmos songs before—a bus that splashes her with rain, a perfect day lingering on the books outside The Strand—then on Vessel, her discoveries are more insular. The album is less about the epic poem of New York than about how the brain and the heart are connected by nerves and blood—less about Kline’s place in the world, than her place within herself. Her New York optimism, in fact, feels despairingly absent; adding to the sense that things have changed is a macabre image of her beloved dog in a taxidermy museum. And while Frankie Cosmos has always been punk in spirit (here, there are 18 tracks in 33 minutes), Vessel’s unvarnished indie rock is a hair closer to punk in sound. A couple of songs do exceed three minutes—which is like “Desolation Row” by Kline’s wise standard of brevity.
No matter the setting, it is hard to imagine Kline ever being starved for inspiration. You could picture her left at a beach penning witty odes to ex-lovers based on every seashell. Kline makes things as banal as a dying phone feel profound. Her language remains a singular mix of pure love and self-loathing, like a romantic e.e. cummings bot amid a stream of raw protected tweets. One moment, on the retro daydream “Duet,” Kline is “making a list of people to kiss/The list is a million Yous long.” Later, on the charmingly faltering piano ballad “Ur Up,” she is succumbing to a modern nagging concern (u up?), but adding her own vernacular and political twists: “I wonder if ur up/I’m America/Thinkin’ of you for no reason.” It’s funny and it shakes you all the same. As ever, Kline’s words are alive on the page as much as in song. “I want in on the other side/Of your eyelids where you hide”—from “Caramelize”—is one of the loveliest lines I’ve ever heard, or read, about connection among the painfully shy. Our inner lives are confusing, this all seems to say, but Kline’s melodies are like magnets that pull us through the maze.
When Kline sings about heavy things—like the emptiness of the world, the meaninglessness of a crush, crying, death—she does so in a way that makes her subject feel bearable upon arrival. Her softness is like a coping mechanism in the face of harsh reality, which is never clearer than on the twee thrasher “Being Alive.” Each of Kline’s bandmates takes a turn singing the quintessentially Frankie chorus, as if it were too weighty to carry alone: “Being alive/Matters quite a bit/Even when you/Feel like shit/Being alive.” It all brilliantly conveys a kind of muted resignation to feeling transcendentally alive, but its sense of togetherness also testifies to the power of friendship as a way of getting there.
There is often a hard-edged realism to Vessel that Kline hasn’t exhibited before. She shows the personal is political, with blunt appeals to “be less accommodating” of others before herself. But more than ever, her writing feels straight-up despondent, with a twinge of “Daria”-like jade—there are songs titled “Apathy” and “I’m Fried”—which makes Vessel recall one of Kline’s noted influences: the lost 1950s folk outsider Connie Converse, who also expertly tied her dejection to wit. Kline sees shallowness in others and the weaknesses in herself. She feels a general disconnect: “I won’t get married,” she sings, “Not at the party.” But through it, she sends a message that someone like Converse couldn’t in her time: That young women are allowed to be dour.
Vessel is not the first album I would suggest to an uninitiated Frankie Cosmos fan. Still, as with any great book or television series, you want to continue following along, even if the best place to start is at the beginning. With her lengthy tracklists, Kline has found a way to evoke the endlessness of her unruly Bandcamp experience even as she puts out formal records—and if this lends Vessel a feeling of being slightly unformed, it’s fitting. Kline’s songs, after all, are so much about how humans are rarely fully-formed, and the universal process of growing up that also—spoiler—never quite ends.
