Back in 2021 we wrote about A Love Song for Everyone, the debut album from then Rome-based duo Juliette Rapp and Chris Marks , AKA Permanent Vacation. Through “combining indie folk and bedroom pop sensibilities, then adding elements of shoegaze too, the band achieve a sound at once detailed and deep,” we wrote, “retaining the intimacy of the classic Z Tapes aesthetic while weaving something richer in scope.”
Fast forward eighteen months and Permanent Vacation are now based in Mexico City, and have just released brand new album Shelf Life via Totally Real Records. It’s a collection of songs which doubles down on the intimate dimension of their previous work, the arrangements often fragile and sparse, Rapp’s vocals echoing through them as though in an empty room. Take opener ‘Peach Juice’ and the way it blurs otherwise vivid sensations with a melancholy haze. “Peach juice / Early morning hesitancy,” Rapp sings, “Wet grass / Water shed the best of me.” The images are somehow removed, held at arm’s length, creating a sense of wistful longing.
I’ll never come back again
It’s better off memory
Forget the acquaintances
They won’t remember me
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This juxtaposition of vivid images and dreamy remove is key feature of Shelf Life. Be it lilting folk song ‘The King in Yellow,’ with its sad little shrines, crashed Cadillacs and slashed tyres, or the sycamore syrup and familiar cups of ‘Hurricane Stew’. Single ‘And So It Goes’ might be the best example, conjuring specific moments through cut lips and milky beers, birdsong and cigarette smoke and cleared throats. Palpable sensations rendered dreamlike by time, as though with frequent handling the memories have been sanded smooth.
Writing of the debut Permanent Vacation album, we described how the shoegaze elements countered the nostalgia with something more forward facing. “What results is something reflective but charged with a sense of sense of motion too,” we described, “as though in being caught between the past and the present, they choose to look to the future instead.” But Shelf Life strips this side of the duo’s sound almost entirely, and thus redirects the focus. Be it in the moody simmer of ‘Blueprints’ or mournful plea of ‘Crusade’. Even ‘Western Medicine’, the richest track by some distance, cannot get out from under the weight of the past. Permanent Vacation are no longer looking forward and dreaming, choosing instead to sit still and quiet, cataloguing things lost along the way.
Maybe, I’m falling down the drain pipe
Maybe, I’ve lost the things in my sight
Maybe, I’m feeling sorta strange, these
Things happen so quickly
I’m ready, will you
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Shelf Life is out now via Totally Real Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.