Frankie Cosmos - Different Talking

Different Talking, the sixth and, so far, best album by NYC indie-rock four-piece Frankie Cosmos, seems to exist across time and space, as we all kind of do. It’s a collection of fragments and memories, remembered places, and reinterpreted feelings that adds up to a lucent, humming whole: a sturdy, worldly indie-rock record about aging and the passage of time that nonetheless manages to feel sharply current. Frankie Cosmos’ lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Greta Kline has long been heralded as one of contemporary indie music’s most deft and most necessary writers, but on Different Talking, her lyrics soften out slightly, the wry cynicism that defined recent records now giving way to an acknowledgment of the awesome, and necessary, fallibility of the human brain and heart.

To classify Different Talking as a return to form, or at least a return to the lush directness of earlier Frankie Cosmos records, would be rude but also wholly incorrect: as Different Talking makes clear, you can never return to the comfort and bravery of your early twenties, but that person always kind of lives inside you, no matter how much you change. Different Talking is about finding that person, honoring them, and learning from them. “A lot of the album is about being grown up and figuring out how to know yourself – like, ‘What is moving on?’” says Kline. “How do we move on when we’re addicted to a cycle of haunting our own past? Writing songs is just the way through that.”