REVIEW: Triathalon - Online

Raquel Dalarossa

It’s been nearly three years since Triathalon’s last full-length release. Since 2015’s Nothing Bothers Me, the Savannah trio moved to New York City, recruited a new band member, and changed their sound entirely. Though they’ve always traded in slacker-tinged soundscapes, the new album, Online, sees them move decidedly away from their psychedelic surf rock towards R&B pop.

Those who tuned into the band's 2016 EP, Cold Shower, would have already seen the change coming. Those four tracks introduced an expressly sultry side to the band that hadn’t been spotlighted in either of their two previous full-length efforts. Online is a bit less lusty but just as smooth, with lead vocalist Adam Intrator moving comfortably between an energized falsetto and a lower register, rap-like flow. There’s a catchiness to each of the thirteen tracks on here, though it’s distinctly an after-hours sort of record—hazy guitar chords, synths, and piano keys float above the kinds of beats you’d hear at an apartment party that’s winding down. The more upbeat tracks, like “Sometimes” and “Plant” (the latter being a real highlight for its jazzy instrumentation), stand out from the languid, even anodyne quality of the rest.

Tracks like “Pull Up” and “Deep End” might register as seductive at first, but soon become sedative, especially in light of the album’s lyrics. In the former, broken sentences slowly put together a picture of a dreary routine: “I’m doing / My work outs high / I’m floating by.” And again in the latter, we hear Intrator struggling through the day-to-day: “Go back to my room and watch another show like everyone / Lately I can’t focus, work too much and deal with bullshit.” Online depicts a life of feeling overworked and out of touch, with relationships and substances serving as passive pastimes.

In light of this, the album’s title becomes intriguing. Though cynical takes on internet culture are overdone and overblown (see, for example, those videos that your aunt shares on Facebook, darkly portraying kids on their iPhones as the voiceover talks about how “disconnected” we all are), I think we all recognize, from time to time, the truism in the cliches. Being online is like switching our brains to a channel of white noise, our thumbs scrolling in absent-minded habit. How often do we find ourselves in that mental mode even when we’re not necessarily staring at a screen?

Online hardly mentions the internet outright (except for a couple of references to social media) but its portrayal of the everyday—sleepwalking through life and trying to fill our time—feels like the online ghost worlds we create for ourselves, spilling over into real life. Even on the most enamored and alive track (“I haven’t felt this way in a minute,” Intrator says), he’s still, at the end of the day, stoned and just sitting in his living room. “Couch” is a love song for the disengaged, eyes glossed over but dick somehow still hard.

There’s something odd about listening to pop that’s so depressing (particularly, for its relatability). Triathalon successfully explore a new genre without losing their talent for a conversational kind of lyricism that upends our experience of their music, putting escapism into a harsh light that reflects back on us.

REVIEW: Casket Girls - The Night Machines

Kelly Kirwan

The Greene sisters have cultivated their own brand of Southern Gothic. Living in Savannah as self-styled "recluses," the two have drawn a following with their soft, even vocals which always serve to temper their dissonant, organ-synth melodies. Their selective ventures into the public eye are to perform as Casket Girls, a term that’s carried the question mark of a ghost story in its own right.

As the legend goes, casket girls were groups of women brought over from Europe, mostly to Louisiana. They were meant to be brides, but whispers and side-eyes grew, and soon the matrimonial exchange evolved into the idea that casket girls were, in fact, otherworldly. It’s no wonder that Phaedra and Elsa Greene felt akin to these waifs and their ghostly reputation. Their promotional posters always incorporate a motif of blindness, a palm or cloth covering the eye, conjuring up references to the wool-spinning Moirai, sisters of fate that could see the future in the thread they spun. 

It’s a theme that carries over into their latest album, The Night Machines, which dives into supernatural subjects like clairvoyance and our delicate mortality. The deep, unwavering percussion comes into play, courtesy of TW Walsh (of Pedro the Lion), along with Ryan Graveface (of Black Moth, and of course the band's label Graveface Records) rounding out their shades of shoegaze goth. It’s a sort of airy punk-mysticism that Casket Girls have developed over the past few years with steady success.

Their track "Walk the Water" begins with an eerie sort of exhale—a phantom’s cry, or a gust of wind? It then breaks into a tangy synth evocative of a pipe organ, whose keys are being pressed with fervent abandon. “We live in this unusual world / Isn’t it delusional?” they pose, their voices veering into a higher pitch, before adding, “Walk the water / Seek the past,” alluding, it seems, to our flawed sense of the real. Casket Girls give us the pin to poke holes in those presumptions, coming to us as songbird sages or fortune tellers, backed by a catchy hook. 

"Mermaid Cottage" unfolds with a crinkling beat and, again, that organ pitch against a gentle trill, "I dream of sin / That glitters in the sun / Where you and I will rest my darling one ... We’ll shed our skin and finally get free." It’s a softer song, an air of indie pop that feels at peace, without those darker inklings we’ve come to know previously.

The thing with truth, the Greene sisters warn, is that "it always shatters." On The Night Machines, we see how their dreams and their affinity for the magical is more than just an escape. It’s a respite, an acceptance, and a sense of freedom in the tides that will "wash away our skin" and leave behind a specter that knows no earthly tethers. Casket Girls' aesthetic is more than mere affectation, and it begs to be embraced.

TRACK REVIEW: Saint Corsair - Brushes Like A Fox

Will Shenton

After listening to "Brushes Like A Fox," the latest track from Saint Corsair's debut EP on indie label Furious Hooves, Velvet & Soil seems to be a perfectly fitting name for the album. On it, the Savannah, Georgia-based band paints two seemingly contradictory sounds—one is a smooth, shimmering instrumental waltz, equally synthesized and organic, while the other is a voice whose gravelly drone draws the instruments back down to earth.

It's a beautiful juxtaposition, pitting a sultry tune against restrained, almost pessimistic lyrics and delivery, and it serves to give the song some real complexity that warrants multiple listens. We're excited to see where Saint Corsair goes from here, as it's the first we've heard of them so far—if the rest of their stuff is anything like "Brushes Like A Fox," prepare to be impressed.

REVIEW: Triathalon - Nothing Bothers Me

Raquel Dalarossa

Though it is a coastal town, Savannah, GA, with all its antebellum charm and cobblestoned roads, is certainly not your average breeding ground for surf pop. But in the context of this witchy city, Triathalon’s music makes perfect sense; sun and surf are combined with blues and soul, and a healthy dose of trippy jams round out the sound. The cover art for the Georgian’s sophomore release, Nothing Bothers Me, depicts the record’s contents rather accurately: bright, watery blue is undercut by a shadowy dark, like a close-up of a deep, murky sea.

At first listen, Triathalon’s music sounds like those glistening crests of placid ocean waves, reminiscent of acts like Real Estate or Mac Demarco. Watery guitars shimmer over easy, upbeat melodies in tracks like “Ways” and “Nothing Bothers Me,” but those quickly prove themselves to be more or less outliers. The opening song “Mellow Moves” and the album’s first single “Slip’n” give a better representation of what Triathalon are capable of, with both of them hovering around the seven-minute mark and featuring slow, simmering moments interspersed between twitchy, wobbly jams. “Slip’n” in particular features the kind of sinister touches that gives the band’s music an intriguing edge, like the inhuman, harmonizing vocals in the intro that bring a creepy lullaby to mind, and a darkly-tinged chord progression throughout.

Mid-album highlight “Chill Out” is a strong showing of how well Triathalon balance these tonal elements. A pronounced, ominous bass line is juxtaposed against singer Adam Intrator’s breathy falsetto, while a discordant guitar languidly jangles along. “I’ve been dreaming of you,” sings Intrator, but it’s difficult to discern whether these dreams constitute fantasy or nightmare. And in fact, the entire narrative of the album follows a protagonist who goes from being captivated to practically being held captive. Early on in the track list, we get the lovesick ballad “It’s You,” in which Intrator confesses that “Now it’s getting hard to be alone without my babe / So help me out, I’m dying here, I need your embrace.” By the time we reach “Slip’n,” we hear him practically fleeing from the former object of his affection, desperately singing “She’s in my head, she knows / It’s seeping in, I’m broke.”

Even their instrumental numbers point to a shift in the mood as the record plays. The second track “Fantasy Jam” gives us an inviting guitar riff where notes scale upwards and hit sparkly peaks, where further down the road we get “Step Into the Dark,” with it’s ever so slightly menacing turns in melody.

Happily, the last two songs on the album provide some sleepy respite, with Intrator even singing “Feeling better now / I forgot what I was sad about.” It’s a strange and sudden turn-around, which aids in the album’s overall Twilight Zone-y effect. In an indie landscape that’s rather saturated with surfy sounds, the quietly subversive quality of this record feels clever and well done. All told, Nothing Bothers Me wouldn’t be entirely out of place on a beach trip, but don’t be surprised if a few bad omens turn up along the way.