by Sara Mae (@veryverynoisy)
Aunt Katrina’s Hot, out via Pittsburgh label Crafted Sounds, feels like letting loose after hours, blasting music over the office intercom and sneaking your friends in to dance. It’s all the marshmallows in the bowl of Lucky Charms that stick in your teeth, with its Y2K computer game nostalgia and sweaty danciness. The record’s way of moving from acoustic finger picking to head banging synth, like on “Obsessed,” are what make this a refreshing, surprising listen and worth revisiting again and again to notice new details.
Aunt Katrina started as the project of feeble little horse member Ryan Walchonski, and was later filled out by a star studded cast: Ray Brown of Snail Mail, Eric Zidar of Tosser, Emma Banks, Connor Peters and Laney Ackley. The liner notes point towards the recordings getting “fleshed out in a live setting” and the songs definitely have that aliveness and vacillating rhythm. It’s centered by the approach to singing. Whereas in feeble little horse, Lydia Slocum keens over the pop beats, Walchonski here levels out lower notes and offers a tense balance with the otherwise energetic progressions. His mellow voice hovers over grapevining synth riffs. Distorted interjections from a deeper tenor emerge.
“Optimistically” weaves in news anchor samples of paranoid headlines – “Are casinos targeting the elderly?” Aging is a theme across the album. There’s a scene in Meet Me in the Bathroom where LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy does ecstasy for the first time, and buys a ton of Juicy Fruit to chew because he had heard people chew a lot of gum when they’re rolling. There is something in the frenetic euphoria of this record that feels like that, which is impressive and maybe bolstered by the fear of aging that undergirds the lyrical content of the songs. That there is an imperative to let loose in the face of our paranoia and grief and humanness.
The sound of wind chimes on “Choir” and the repeated samples of choral singing create a delicious eeriness that make it a standout on the record. “Get Me Out of Bed'' starts off with a Sonic Youth-y guitar tone build, and moves towards a layering of slow playback deep voices, a low glitching tone. “Sunday” begins with a SOPHIE sound effect, a rapid bubble wrap popping, before launching into a bright synth foundation. “When I Go Away” has a twinkling, rising electronic sound, at times leaning into an almost blown out sound, and ending in a whimsical repetition of hyperreal bell sounds. “Let Me Go” is a quieter moment to finish the album, with auto-tuned vocals coming in and out with tremolo, sweet piano riffs playing underneath, and more straightforward guitar riffs building a slow emo momentum. This record feels like musician’s music in its approach to production and its themes. It has a broad tonal palette that really pays off, a frenzy of weird and wired songs.