Cassette
Another under-the-radar gem outta the current San Fran scene with this latest six track collection from Katiana Mashikian's Mister Baby project. If you don't know of Mister Baby already, you may still have encountered Mashikian's playing with various other notables, perhaps most prominently with the Reds, Pinks & Purples and April Magazine. Fans of those bands would do well to check in here too, for alone she shines just as brightly. Operating in a space broadly similar to that of April Magazine and Cindy, and satisfying the 'fog pop' descriptor Glenn Donaldson has previously assigned to much of the music coming out of the Bay Area right now, Mashikian's songwriting is both loosely dreamy and melodically driven, vocals transmitted from under a duvet of tape hiss, the kind of sounds you might need when the distance between the bed and the door feels just that little bit too far. As with a few of her peers, the appeal of the Mister Baby sound hinges a fair bit on its recording quality, the limited fidelity not so much an affectation but a necessary means of capturing the appropriate feeling, the glumness of being sunk under the day and the private need to sing yourself out of a hole. And it's such watercolour smudged mystery that keeps me coming back, trying to grasp at these plume-like songs that somehow manage to be both vaporously undefined and so emotionally engaging. A beguiling wonder. A full album remains very much a necessity.
