Frankie Cosmos

Greta Kline, the daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, grew up musically with Aaron Maine's project Porches that released the EPs Summer of Ten (2011), Je T'Aime (2011) and Scrap and Love Songs Revisited (2012) and then the albums Slow Dance in the Cosmos (2013) and Pool (2016), on which he converted to synth-pop.

Kline, still a teenager, assumed the moniker Frankie Cosmos and started releasing tons of music on Bandcamp. The mini-album Zentropy (Double Double Whammy, 2014), recorded when she was still only 19 years old, is an album of melancholy bedroom-pop (Art School). However, she succeeds brilliantly in two songs that evoke 1960s virginal heroines Petula Clark and Francoise Hardy: Birthday Song and Dancing In The Public Eye. Even better is the catchy, propulsive and danceable Buses Splash With Rain.

Next Thing (Bayonet, 2016) contains 15 brief songs recorded with vocalist and keyboardist Gabby Smith (of Eskimeaux), bassist David Maine (Aaron's brother), and drummer Luke Pension. Now she sounds like the child of Tamla's exuberant soul of the 1960s and British twee-pop of the 1990s. The singalong Floated In and the breezy If I Had a Dog are the highlights. She can be both tender and inventive, as in On the Lips. There is still charm in her simplicity, but too many of the songs are irrelevant, hard to listen to more than once.

She continued to release similar collections of brief songs: Vessel (2018), Close It Quietly (2019), Great Scraps (2020) under the moniker• Franz Charcoa, Inner World Peace (2022), etc.