Vessel

In a diffuse time of online life and ever-rising rents, the old-school band-as-gang is a rarer thing than it once was. But that’s Vessel’s lifeblood: four friends, breathing the same air, living and working around each other. A casual way to kill time during the pandemic became an ongoing affair, the quartet steadily crafting songs together for two years and beginning to play live when shows returned. Their debut gig was at a friend’s house party in Knoxville; they were still playing under an acronym created with their initials before picking the name Vessel out of a hat of suggestions each had submitted. Soon, they signed to Double Phantom Records and began preparing their debut album, Wrapped In Cellophane.

The result is an album that zips along through one infectious idea after another, landing on the more effervescent side of the art-rock spectrum. If Vessel is an organism made of these four players, Tuisku provides the heartbeat: Her drums are the crisp propulsion underneath everything, and her vocals peel out alongside Robinson’s guitar and Bishop’s sax. Most of Tuisku’s lyrics derive from her own life, mulling over distance and relationships. Sometimes, the relentless, coiled rhythms the quartet favor can mimic the feeling of those emotions constricting in your chest, but most often Vessel strike playful contrasts — “Lost Appeal” grapples with numbness and apathy while the music adopts a bouncy, doo-wop inspired tone. Elsewhere, images and ideas collide in vibrant fashion. Whether a takedown of the rich and fake and famous in “Game” or a tale of aliens in “Abducted,” fun asides coexist with heavier songs like “Blonde” — a lesbian love affair unfolding in a psych ward and ending in tragedy.

Throughout, you can hear how Vessel patiently chiseled spontaneity into precision. Free-form jams have become punchy pop missiles in their hands — sometimes hypnotic, sometimes kraut-y, sometimes breakneck, sometimes danceable, sometimes pining, sometimes sly. Across Wrapped In Cellophane, Vessel make a sound that could only be the result of these four people together in a room — a sound that is wildly, vividly alive.