At Home

When Lindsay Zoladz interviewed Keep Shelly in Athens for us in January of last year, frontwoman Sarah P talked briefly about her background as an actress. “That’s how I learned to be on stage,” she explained. “I can’t say to Actor Sarah, ‘Don’t come up on stage with me.’ No, she’s always with me. She’s an actor, she wants to be on stage.” She apparently wants to be on records, too: The group’s ice-cold, palace-of-glaciers debut — arriving three years after their misty, cryptogrammic early EPs — is defined by its deliberate grandeur. Its opening track — titled, naturally, “Time Exists Only to Betray Us” — thunders into existence: a big boom of bass, a rain of glass-shard synths and Sarah’s Stevie-Nicks-as-Lady-Macbeth wail arriving in one shattering cataclysm of sound and light. From there, the album maintains its ether-clawing aerialism, stirring Sarah’s liquid sugar voice into milky-blue synths and serving it in a frosted champagne flute. It’s called At Home, but that’s only if you’ve got a sweet deal on a lake view somewhere in the mesosphere.

Lyrically, the group traffics in riddles, but Sarah sells it like it’s Noel Coward. In the jittery drum-n-bass paraphrase “Madmen Love,” she heaves… read more »