REVIEW: Kitty - Miami Garden Club

Phillipe Roberts

“I think it’s so ironic that you’re taking your holiday exactly where I wish I could escape from.”

Yikes. These words from Kitty’s “509 Seabreeze” should sting for a native Floridian like myself, and they absolutely would if they weren’t so blindingly accurate. Growing up in the margins of the nation’s tourist trap is a peculiar privilege; pinned between two luxurious, sandy coastlines and punctured by a monstrous fairytale complex where a laughably low minimum wage keeps the dream alive for seemingly everyone but its residents, the Sunshine State naturally breeds escapist fantasy.

And it’s exactly here that we catch up with internet pop prodigy Kitty. After losing the entire first draft of her album to the unfeeling void that is LAX baggage claim, she began a hometown recovery effort that would become Miami Garden Club. True to its name, the debut album documents an artist clawing out of the weeds, with Kitty pruning and primping her sound into a sprawling collection that bursts with color. Over the course of its thirteen tracks, she sharpens her trademark electronic bounce to a point that threads the needle between ballads and bangers—it slices through to the core of boredom-fueled love and lust without skipping a beat, and picks up new tricks along the way.

After years of winding her hypnotic, breathy vocals around other producers' tracks, it’s refreshing to see Kitty producing her own this time around. Even better, the first time seems to be the charm: some of Miami Garden Club’s finest moments feature Kitty dancing to the beat of her own drums. “Affectionate,” a sly warning to a former lover, fuses the album’s strongest vocal hook to a tambourine groove that bucks her usual vaporous tendencies in favor of a neon-drenched, mid-tempo thump. It’s the album’s most infectiously danceable moment. And while “Sugarwater,” later in the album, might initially feel like a retread of old ideas—its clicking hi-hats and woozy synths are vintage Kitty—having complete control over the production seems to inspire some of her best lyrics. “The name of the band is Talking Heads / But you always add a 'the' to the beginning” is one hell of a cred-obliterating dig, especially to someone who can’t walk a hundred feet without “stumbling over flyers for your show on the street.”

In this light, it makes sense that the album only truly stumbles on tracks where Kitty relies more heavily on collaboration. “Mass Text Booty Call,” despite its hilarious premise and a bit of fun braggadocio in its opening radio skit, falls short in the absence of a convincing hook. But thankfully, Kitty hits far more often than she misses when she commits to her ridiculous, spontaneous energy. When “Asari Love Song,” an '80s power ballad for her “intergalactic love,” erupts into a soaring guitar solo, it’s undeniably convincing. With heart-stopping synth stabs and crackling reverb snares coiling around her sweetly menacing vocals, Kitty conquers this new, funky territory with frightening ease.

Moving back home—even when that home isn’t brimming with mosquitoes and dogged by hurricanes—is never an easy proposition. Endless questions, real or imagined, about whether you’ve failed or how long you’ll be back seem to lurk around every familiar corner. To an artist like Kitty, who pioneered the model for using a crafty internet persona to flee from small-town obscurity, the move had the potential to be downright paralyzing. Miami Garden Club, with its leaps in songwriting and production that reaffirm how far she’s come from those limiting surroundings, is not the sound of paralysis. It’s the sound of a master escape artist putting her well-laid plans into action.

REVIEW: Elisa - Morning Again EP

Laura Kerry

For nuanced emotional storytelling, synth pop is rarely the palette of choice. Its messages tend to stick to tropes such as declarations of love or straightforward tales of heartbreak, better for dancing than reflecting.

Under the songwriting and production of Elisa, though, synth pop expresses a wide and detailed array of feelings. In her new EP, Morning Again, her first release since 2015’s These Days, the artist uses shimmering synths and danceable beat loops to delve into her own psyche and beyond. On one level, the album is a collection of hook-filled tunes that are easy to fall into. On another, it is something to be considered and explored.

Morning Again begins with wordplay. The album and its title track refer to both “morning,” the time of day that signals new hope, and “mourning,” its sad homophone. According to Elisa, “Morning Again,” the song, is a response to the feeling that violence has saturated the news. The track, apparently written in one day, reacts to “another innocent life taken by police brutality, another woman victimized by toxic masculinity, another mass shooting.” Set against retro synths and a beat that borrows from disco, the content is particularly surprising—and is all the more effective because of that. Elisa’s voice is pretty as she sings, “Morning again in America / You better kiss your baby / Better get home safely for the night.” The only hints of ominousness in the music come in a low drone after the second chorus that leads into a surge of energy on the bridge. “Can you hear the sirens screaming?” she sings, her voice rising in what sounds like desperation.

For the remaining three tracks, Elisa mainly sticks to themes of personal grief and desire. In “You Can Wear The Mink”—a song that starts out slow and reflective, drops a dance-inducing beat, then takes a dark turn—the vocals continually return to a close, intimate sound, marked by the percussive “k” on the line “You can wear the mink.” Though the images never settle into a clear narrative, the song is evocative. In “Awake,” a soft and fluid verses give way to an anthemic chorus, led by the soulful line, “We all want to feel safe,” the last two words ringing out in echoed repetition. In “Can’t Work For Love,” Elisa spins a tale about a failed relationship through religious imagery and instrumentation that pulses darkly. In the delightfully strange and catchy second half of the chorus, she simply sings a wicked round of the syllable “ha.”

At first a familiar pastiche of ‘80s synths and pop songstress vocals, Morning Again reveals itself to be much more surreal and intimate. Drawing on the darker parts of her experience, Elisa makes fantastical tunes that rescue the listener from their own.

FIELD REPORT: Roosevelt // Shallou at The Chapel

all photos: Will Shenton

Will Shenton

I love simple concert lineups. As much fun as it can be to sit through four openers (hell, I've found some of my favorite bands that way), sometimes it's nice to actually have a sense of when the headliner will be on. There's also a certain reassuring hubris to a two-act show, as if the bookers didn't feel the need to hedge their bets. In the case of Wednesday night's Roosevelt // Shallou double-feature at The Chapel in San Francisco, the two complemented each other so well that a longer bill would only have distracted from their chemistry.

Shallou, a solo electronic musician from Chicago, took the stage with a second performer to kick things off. I hadn't listened to any of their recordings before the show, but their set had us all rapt by the end of the first song. His style isn't earth-shattering in its originality, utilizing the familiar patterns of a lot of today's futurebeat artists, but the execution was absolutely flawless. Considering his last EP was released at the end of 2015, I'm excited to hear what's next.

Roosevelt, a solo musician as well, surprised everyone (well, at least me) right off the bat by coming onstage with a band. It hadn't occurred to me that his synth-heavy pop would translate well to guitar, bass, and drums, but its roots in disco made that fairly obvious upon reflection. His drummer, who bore a striking resemblance to Packers linebacker Clay Matthews, was endlessly fun to watch, and brought the studio version of the beats to life with high-energy flourishes and a fantastic stage presence. They made for a hugely likable trio, and I'd recommend catching them live if you have even the faintest interest in Roosevelt's music.

REVIEW: Boy Harsher - Yr Body is Nothing

Laura Kerry

It’s no surprise that, according to an interview from last year, the personal and musical relationship that comprises Boy Harsher began with a church/warehouse space and the song “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Back in Savannah, Georgia, where the duo lived and went to film school before moving up to Northampton, Massachusetts, Jae Matthews had an aha moment watching Gus Muller dancing to New Order, and she began to woo him by sending him her prose writing, which he set to music, thus creating their first project together, Teen Dreamz.

Now, an EP and a brand new full-length later, Boy Harsher has perfected the formula whose seeds lie in that revelatory moment in Savannah. On Yr Body Is Nothing, they mix post-industrial warehouses with the dry pulse of ‘80s new wave, creating synth-driven music that infuses its dark, creeping tone with an invitation to move. The duo resembles the band that is central to its mythology, New Order, in both sound and tone—the way it couches songs about emotional states (primarily overwhelming anxiety) in unexpectedly danceable tunes.

Throughout Yr Body Is Nothing, Boy Harsher flickers back and forth between the immediacy of those emotional states and simple numbness. That plays out in the vocals, which are sometimes distant and monotone (“Cry Fest”), and at other times close and despairing (“Last Days”), or even soulful (“Save Me”). In some songs, including the title track, they start out far away but come into focus, escalating the sense of anxiety as it continues. While build-ups in songs typically lead to some sort of release, here they serve to increase the tension, making the unease more palpable. When “Suitor” escalates, it does so in the form of a frenetic bass and a cacophony of voices, including deep breaths; when the beat “drops” after this and structure returns, the dance beat sounds ominous.

On an album full of songs with titles such as “Save Me” and “Cry Fest,” it doesn’t come as too much of a shock that one of the most danceable tunes is called “Morphine.” With a jittery bass line, deep, pulsing beat, and bright organ synth, the instrumentals lead to one of the few real hooks, “She’s like morphine on my mind / She’s like morphine all the time.” More than this refrain, though, another line stands out among the anguished whisper of vocals: "I want to make it hurt more / I want to make you dance." This seems to get to the heart of the album, suggesting that pain and fear and anxiety can push you towards the kinds of music that make you bob your head or move your hips, and that bobbing your head or moving your hips can create a kind of welcome numbness. Through the drone of bass, beat loops, and synths on “Morphine,” “Big Bad John,” and “A Realness,” among other tracks, it’s possible to achieve a moment of catharsis.

PREMIERE: Remote Places - Over My Head

Kelly Kirwan

Justin Geller has had a few renaissances over the span of his career. His band, Pink Skull, metamorphosed from low-key electronica to psych-inspired krautrock, and then ultimately leveled out along a branch of “druggy analog” to produce that mind-altering experience with a modern-day stitch. A steeping stone in his solo career came in the form of a friend’s request to add a song to the fractured-family drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, released in 2013. Now, three years later, DJ, producer, and genre cut-and-paster Geller has released a new EP, Nights and Weekends, under his independent moniker, Remote Places. It has a heavy backwards glance to the '80s, particularly on the single “Over my Head”— with its deep, far-off vocals acting as the rudder amidst swirling rock riffs and cameos of intergalactic synth. 

It’s a song that could’ve been superimposed over scenes of Duckie in the 1986 Hughes classic Pretty in Pink—the shafted suitor that could never break free of the friend zone. “Your heart wasn't ready / But it was ready enough for someone else,” even vocals observe between resonating guitar notes, “All of the times I waited on you ... All of the times you strung me along.” It’s a banger and an open, love-scorned letter that still keeps its cool. Tightly arranged with just the right amount of vintage inspiration, “Over My Head” is enough to bring back the flock of seagulls haircut and pass it off as suave, while giving the cast-aside their well-deserved limelight.