VIDEO PREMIERE: Room Thirteen - Roccopulco

Roccopulco from Room Thirteen on Vimeo.

Laura Kerry

The debut album of the band Room Thirteen came out this past winter, but its spirit season has arrived just in time for the New Orleans-based group to release the video for the title track, “Roccopulco.” A mix of dreamy vocals, bossa nova guitar, and jazzy horns, the song sounds like a vision of the ‘60s imagined while drifting off to sleep on a bright-colored towel at the beach.

The video combines this retro tone with more contemporary touches. Set on a dark stage, it features a blazer- and moustache-sporting saxophonist playing an impassioned solo and backup dancers moving slowly in unison as the song cycles through shimmering harmonies. But the dancers contain elements of both go-go and American Apparel, one of the many ways in which the old-timey and tropical touches don’t take themselves too seriously. Fish dissolve into psychedelic patterns; the sax solo breaks into a cheesy split-screen; and a collection of fruits, leafy plants, and a mysterious glittery “D” appear on stage in the beginning and end before confetti rains down, a delightfully odd way to illustrate their equatorial party vibe. Theatrical, sultry, silly, and as mesmerizing as the song, the video for “Roccopulco” is the perfect way to reimagine Room Thirteen’s summery music.

PREMIERE: Room Thirteen - Roccopulco

Laura Kerry

It is telling that one of five full-fledged members of the New Orleans–based Room Thirteen is credited for playing the bongos and congas. Not your average pop band, the group follows the exotic strain that this lineup suggests. Seeped in lo-fi haze of the girl-group era and loaded with bubbly saxophones, shimmering keys, and sunny harmonies, their new album, Roccopulco, evokes a pool scene in a ‘60s, complete with inflatable flamingos floating, umbrellas in drinks, and people lounging in pastel swimwear. 

Roccopulco is the band’s first album as Room Thirteen, after they abandoned the name Danny, borrowed from the band’s driving force, Danny Clifton. Then and now, Clifton plays bass, drum, and guitar, which all create a rhythmic, lively push at the center of the music. The organ and percussion in “Crushed Velour” hop along, sleepy but sharp; the bass pulses along in a low, jaunty groove on “Rat Rod”; and “Candy Cigarettes” pops with brisk accents of retro guitar. But Room Thirteen isn’t all old-timey pool parties. They do hail from New Orleans, after all, and even their breed of tropical pop can’t escape the influence of their city’s jazz roots. In the prolonged sax solo on “Crushed Velour,” the intricate rhythm on “Crazy From The Heat,” and the bossa nova guitar on “Staring At The Sun,” the band reveals that theirs is a dappled sunshine, marked with different hues and the slightest touch of shadow. Check out Roccupulco for a bit of heat in the winter. 

REVIEW: Froyo Ma - pants

Laura Kerry

You either are or you know someone who can’t stop playing the band name game. It’s that game where, in the middle of a conversation about where to eat dinner, someone says, “Greasy Chinese Food—that’s a great band name.” Froyo Ma, the alias of Zack Villere, sounds like a product of that kind of brainstorming, and therefore reliably elicits the requisite eye roll and chuckle that accompanies that sort of thing. But it also conjures up the other side of the band name game: matching the name to a sound. Once it’s established that Greasy Chinese Food would make a good band name (which I don’t think it would, for the record), the imagination sets to work on what kind of music they would make.

So, what does the name “Froyo Ma” tell us about his music? Nothing much, it turns out—but in a way, that disconnect is telling. More of a producer than a typical artist (although the lines between those two are increasingly blurred), Villere gives very little away about himself on his new EP pants, an electronic, experimental amalgamation of jazz, R&B, and hip-hop. His real name is hard to find on the internet, and he outsources most of the singing on the album. His music also blends so many different influences that it seems impossible to attribute it to a single guy.

Starting with “berrymilk sea,” a minute-long, all-instrumental track of sparsely-laid, non-melodic electronic blips, Froyo Ma sets a tone of jazz-inflected electronic. Warm but strange, it feels like waking up at dawn on an alien planet.

When the next song, “spent missing,” comes in, though, we return promptly to Earth. Leaving behind the ambient synth sounds, Villere lays out straightforward-seeming R&B that, sung in the smooth voice of Charlotte Day Wilson, recalls the late-‘90s, early-2000s neo-soul of Erykah Badu (a cited influence of his) and Lauryn Hill. A weird instrumental break at the minute mark brings back the Boards of Canada vibe, though, reminding us that even in the songs that seem to most decisively stick to one genre, Froyo Ma will infuse it with something weird—the jazz of nearby New Orleans or the low, pulsating bass of his hip-hop idols, to name a few.

From “there,” the restrained-yet-driving third track—the EP’s jazziest—to “squid limbo,” the ambient-synth-turned-rap performed by Yote in the over-enunciated, percussive style of Tyler the Creator (another of his influences), pants covers wide and varied terrain. But, like any good producer, Villere leaves his own mark. Though disparate, pants coheres around its smooth sound and easy, electronic polish. Froyo Ma might be a bit of silly name, but his music is seriously delightful.

REVIEW: Bent Denim - Romances You

Laura Kerry

Bent Denim’s debut LP, Romances You, takes an odd approach to its titular pledge. Both dreamy and gloomy, it lures not with demonstrations of fiery love, but with restrained vulnerability. Comprised of frank and sometimes desperate musings (“When you go to sleep / I’m going to try on your clothes / …So I can know what it feels to be inside you”), the songs unfold like a series of hand-scrawled love notes whose potential creepiness is redeemed by its off-beat poetry.

Part of the appeal of this poetry comes from the fact that—contrary to the timelessness that pop love songs often aspire to (and only occasionally achieve)—it feels perfectly contemporary. On Romances You, Bent Denim expresses what’s not readily discussed in art: the weirdness of romance in the age of Facebook, Google, and Tinder. This comes across most explicitly in the album’s second track, “Caitlin,” a minute-long electronic dirge about the woes of late-night internet stalking. The anxiety and longing (“Caitlin do you like me?”) is fueled by the availability of information, including Caitlin’s past jobs and education—but most painfully in pictures of her “having brunch with friends and not me.” Self-aware and unassuming, it recasts the coolness-in-loserdom sentiments of Radiohead’s “Creep” with 21st-century technological voyeurism.

It’s fitting, then, that this album is a product of another distinctly modern phenomenon: the long-distance band. Bent Denim’s two members, Ben Littlejohn and Dennis Sager, write and record between their respective homes of Nashville and New Orleans, sending each other tracks via email. (The title of their first EP, 2014’s Epistolary, is a nod to this correspondence.) Such a process runs the risk of becoming disjointed or sparse and clinical, but Romances You is coherent and, when it needs to be, lush.

In a musical landscape replete with bedroom-made dream pop, Romances You is also surprising. Just when the drum loops, keyboard chords, and synth layers start to get cozy, Bent Denim injects something new into the music. Because most of the vocals manifest as a subdued, filtered whisper (here’s one more vote for a Sparklehorse comparison), the moments when they break out are particularly striking. In “If But For You,” for example, the voice switches between its usual hurried and conversational whisper and a higher echo, bringing us along for an oddly romantic ride that ends in the narrator’s desire to be unemployed so he can “play with your toys.” There are flowing narrative arcs here—albeit strange ones.

And despite the physical distance of its creators, there’s intimacy, too. In one of the album’s most tender moments, on “Off Chance,” the grinding synth drops out and leaves bare the phrase that begins, “I’ll protect you.” With quietly impactful moments such as this, Bent Denim promises that though their music is filled with longing, they’ll give as much as they ask for.  And they really do—Romances You woos slowly and subtly until, by the end, you find yourself humming along and compulsively going back for more.