With their slow moves, slow crescendos, and bright vocals only stopped by some distortion in the guitars, the Princeton quartet played some very danceable music, part quiet, part loud with sun-saturated synth and light drumming.
Fronted by twin brothers Jesse and Matt Kivel, they both sang, either separately or together, Jesse, while playing guitar or keyboard, doing the largest part, his voice floating around high above the instrumentation. You could actually hear the vocals, a rare thing during live shows, as most of their songs were reserving a large place to voices, above glittering synths and a quiet bass.
Their delicate indie pop was alternating between repetitive and monotonous swirling synths, borderline experimental at time, waken up by electric guitars, but overall their music was the type difficult-to-catch-at-the-first-listening. They played songs form their latest release, and said they would play a song from ‘their old record that bombed’,… was that ‘Cocoon of Love’?
Their second song sounded like a little interlude, another song, played without synth for once, had a hypnotic turning-around melody, and the songs announced as ‘old songs’ sounded more upbeat than the new ones. I thought there was something borderline Death Cab For Cutie, Belle and Sebastian in their helium shimmering pop, although this doesn’t describe very well the music, but, what if I tell you they have opened a few times for Vampire Weekend? That doesn’t describe it better, but may it’s all about the privilege-middle-class-brainy attitude, there could only be one comma between Oxford and Princeton and the band has written a whole EP about British intellectuals, the Bloomsbury Group.
‘Florida’, off their latest release ‘Remembrance of Things to Come’, was undoubtedly all sunny-repetitive synths,in a light-headed atmosphere,… may be you should check out their delicate shoegazy tunes with accidental guitar outbursts, before one of their songs end up on the next indie movie.