The band @ (pronounced “at”) is the duo of Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak. The two had apparently known each other for a while before they started a long-distance (between Philly (Rose) and Baltimore (Filipczak)) musical collaboration at the start of the pandemic. “Mind Palace Music,” their debut LP, is a great, low-key, entertaining album full of catchy songs and appealing textures.
@’s songs show a lot of interesting influences, and the way that @ expresses those influences is both fun and compelling—what I mean is that you can hear the influences, but @ are doing their own thing with those influences, interpreting them, incorporating them into new forms. Rose and Filipczak have referred to their music as “hyperfolk” and you could pretty easily slot this alongside some of the albums from the heyday of freak folk, albums from folks like Feathers, Wooden Wand, Espers, White Magic, etc. There’s some of that, and there’s a little bit of acoustic-guitar-era Animal Collective, Elephant 6 and (especially in some of the guitar sounds) the Microphones. If you (like me) enjoy those bands, you will definitely enjoy this record.
“Star Game” is a standout on the record and it features some great vocals from Rose. The acoustic guitars here sound so good—the very-present guitars of something like the Microphones’ “I Want Wind to Blow.” Light percussion and doubled vocals from Rose (with background vocals from Filipczak) give this such a full, bright sound, while Rose sings about letting go of an old relationship: “The sight of you at the gas station/in a coat of gold/battling the sun,” and “And though I see warmth in my fortune/I’ll never find you in my bed again.”
“First Journal” feels like it has the same spirit as “Prospect Hummer,” the EP that Animal Collective did with Vashti Bunyan. It’s such a short and beautiful song. Rose has said that she wrote this song close to the beginning of the pandemic, when so many of her interactions with other people were through text—and that’s what she’s singing about here, “You are the gem/in my screen.” A really nice evocation, set to gorgeous music, of how much fervor can be brought forth by a little blinking notification or light.