With Bandcamp as their roadmap to discovery and YouTube as their confessional, artists like Soccer Mommy, Clairo, and Jay Som represent a new breed of bedroom-pop musician: introverts who sing confessional lyrics into their Macbooks while turning hazy guitar melodies into earworms. And at first, @, the duo of Philadelphia guitarist Victoria Rose and Baltimore musician Stone Filipczak, appear to fall into that camp as well. As artists destined to collaborate but separated by 100 miles of highway, they swapped song ideas over iMessage before deciding to join forces—virtually, of course—to record a joint album from their respective bedrooms. But in sound, their music has an old-school feel rooted in acoustic guitar and rich vocal harmonies, sounding a little like ’70s-inspired teens hung up on the Mamas & the Papas. Originally released in 2021 and now reissued by Carpark, @’s debut full-length, Mind Palace Music, offers a tidy half hour of raw folk-pop straight from the heart.
The most striking quality of @’s music is also the most human one: their voices. The imperfectness of their singing is akin to Animal Collective’s exuberant tone on Sung Tongs, or the pristine vocal harmonies of girl groups like the Chordettes or the Ronettes if somebody slid them a glass of scotch to take the edge off. Filipczak enunciates each word and sings with a slight, high-pitched lilt that, in flashes, recalls John Lennon, giving a song like “Major Blue Empty” the uncanny air of a Beatles demo. Rose counterbalances with a warm, pure timbre, and the urgency of her delivery resembles emotions bubbling up. Compared to her solo work as Brittle Brian, particularly last year’s Biodiesel, she sounds unburdened as she draws out notes in “Star Game” or “My Garden.” The duo’s vocal harmonies are at once full bodied and delicate, off-key and in tune, merry and forlorn. On the opening “Parapet,” Rose and Filipczak’s evocative vocal harmonies are paired with fluttering piano in a way that perfectly captures the visceral feel of relentless longing.
At a time when most bedroom pop feels tethered to the online world, @ are making music that cuts the ethernet cable, no matter what their alias and origins might suggest. Each instrument on Mind Palace Music sounds well loved from years of jamming, lending the album an intimacy akin to the quiet sounds of a friend performing a song just for you: the buzz of a string vibrating against a fret, the hum of a microphone turning on, the tingle on the back of your neck when two voices intertwine. That human touch is audible in the spritely acoustic guitar and soft thumps of bongos on “Letters,” or the even-keeled flute in “First Journal.” Though the influence of cult favorite Vashti Bunyan is audible on the album’s best single, “Friendship Is Frequency,” the rustic tone of the duo’s guitar and Irish low whistle adds a personable, left-field signature of their own.
