The London duo’s second album boasts a sharpened, more streamlined sound while sticking to its roots in ’70s Anatolian psychedelic pop.
Kit Sebastian’s music is made for the introspective hours between last call and daybreak. The London duo specializes in a kind of cinematic funk noir whose dusty grooves both amplify and soothe the rush of ego calculations that only emerge in the small hours of the morning. By the time vocalist Merve Erdem stops to gaze up at the clock on “Elegy for Love,” the midpoint of their second album, Melodi, they’re still wading neck-deep through the interminable twilight that they’ve staked out as their territory. “4:50 in the morning/Walls around me/Dreary and wrinkled,” she observes in a breathy monologue, lamenting her imminent surrender to a lover’s call and a cold return to “a distant past we both despise.”
Sonically speaking, the past is not quite so distant for Kit Sebastian. The inebriated backbeat, crumbling piano chords, and steady drip of horns are clear, if reliable holdovers from Mantra Moderne, a slice of seductive Turkish funk that set them up as serious contenders to be the darlings of your favorite crate-digging producer. Melodi occasionally succumbs to that impulse, sinking deep into the clouds of smoke billowing out from their psychedelic speakeasy and settling for bursts of rose-tinted head-nodding. But like the narrator of “Elegy for Love,” Kit Sebastian are haunted by a desire for more than quick-fix nostalgia, and they work quickly across their record to cut down on the brooding sprawl. Harnessing Erdem’s sharpened vocal talents and scrubbing off the lo-fi grit that obscured their debut, the band returns with a streamlined album that more confidently shoulders the weight of their retro-futuristic balancing act.
Similar to the way fellow revivalists Khruangbin use the lyrical guitar work and peculiar bends of ’60s Thai funk and rock records as an anchor for their global influences, Erdem and co-conspirator Kit Martin never stray too far from the ’70s Anatolian psychedelic pop that brought them together. But while the Texas trio can overextend its songwriting and lapse into an unsatisfying genre soup, Kit Sebastian commit even more narrowly to plumbing the depths of this primary influence on Melodi. The slinky, keyboard- and bass-driven sound of Turkish singer-songwriter Şenay steps out swinging on effusive album opener “Yalvarma,” and the stomping, soaring epics of rock musician Barış Manço come pouring out of “Affet Beni”’s winding boogie. Though Martin’s eagerness to emerge from beneath the tape hiss gives the album a bit more weight, it’s Erdem who shines as Melodi’s breakout star. Her shifts from English to Turkish, used to excellent effect on Mantra Moderne standout “Senden Başka,” work even better here: The sudden change of verbal pacing gives the chorus of “Agitate” a particularly majestic lift that tears it out of the track’s plodding shuffle. But she truly finds her center on “Yeter”’s Turkish-language vocal, which climbs into the upper reaches of her range in a swooning, theatrical performance that would’ve been swallowed whole by the Manatra Moderne’s buzzy mix.
While this decluttering does clear space for Kit Sebastian to bounce around within their influences, working from a stricter blueprint finds the band exhausting any surprises within their instrumental palette all too quickly; seductive in small doses, Melodi at times plays like an extended songwriting exercise. “Inertia,” a late-game highlight buoyed by infectiously swaggering horn fanfare, can’t muster enough energy to push past the deja vu, and all the traditional Turkish instrumentation that producer Martin stuffs into penultimate track “Ahenk” isn’t enough to hold your attention. When the creative dam finally bursts on closer “Please Don’t Take This Badly,” a winking, acoustic-guitar-led ballad that ends by accelerating to a thrilling jazzy swirl, you’re left wishing that the band had been more eager to chase those influences across the map.
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