Album Premiere: Frankie Valet—’Waterfowl’

Posted: 4th February, 2020 by The Editor

A valet driver has to be versatile. Someone who’s comfortable cruising stranger’s cars of various shapes and sizes through a maze of other vehicles they’re tasked with safeguarding. It might sound like an easy gig, but it’s trickier than that. Weaving through a parking lot’s worth of rock sub-genres on a single record requires a similar level of finesse, and on their sophomore record Waterfowl, Frankie Valet do it without nicking a single bumper. The St. Louis band put out a few EP’s before their 2018 full-length Stop Apologizing, an inconsistent yet very promising debut of scrappy power-pop with some serious highs. After some lineup switches that slimmed them to a solid quartet, they’re now returning with Waterfowl, which feels like their first fully-realized artistic statement.

The 10-song record finds common ground among a litany of styles and sounds; swollen shoegaze pop, slowcore, classic twee, emo and good ole indie-rock. The band restlessly switch between three different vocalists with three distinct voices, so the album plays like a refreshingly dynamic melange of sticky hooks, balmy shoegaze builds, creative riffs and memorable basslines. Songs like “Engulfed” and the Dogs On Acid-esque “Our Apartment” are beer-in-hand sing-alongs, whereas tracks like “Nakid” and “Soft Skin” crescendo neatly into swirling reverb and hypnotic grooves. Frankie Valet’s sound cannot be described in a single song, and for some bands that could be seen as a detrimental lack of identity. Here, the scattered tracklist feels born of a youthful urge to encapsulate their early-twenties growth, a period of our lives when a single semester can feel like a transformative era of maturation. Why try to confine that to a sole expression?

Waterfowl is a terrific listen from top to bottom, and you can stream it in full below ahead of its release this Friday:

Waterfowl is out 2/7 via It Takes Time Records. Pre-order vinyl/tape/digital here.

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Eli Enis | @eli_enis

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