GEM CLUB

To be drunk on inhaled clouds of late-summer dust motes and flickers of lightening bugs held in ether; to unfocus for a moment stretching itself into hours, before you realize that’s what you’ve done; long expanses of morning transitioning into evening without hiccup—maybe a muted laugh of a girl a few neighborhoods away; when something as close as an arm’s length, let alone a few neighborhoods away, feels immeasurably distant; to experience all as unobstructed views of heavy, humid sky—an unfocused gaze through fog, a hazy stare through a moving crowd or down long halls: what sounds so harsh and sharp-ended, and, well, acidic, Acid and Everything is a tragically misleading title for what is a beautifully rendered, soft-focus EP.

Acid and Everything is not that at all, just sparse piano ballads featuring only Christopher Barnes, using his perpetually murmured, half-defeated vocals, and Kristen Drymala’s clear bars of cello interspersed with a few, carefully distributed chimes and layering whispers. It begins with what is maybe on other albums a superfluous gesture or nod to something experimental, ambient. “[Birds],” is exactly so: a recording of birds and the shuffle of leaves with a woodblock knocking far away and a few, bright chimes pricking through. However, it does create a much-needed, bare space for the weight of piano and humidity that descends immediately afterwards, fallen like one of these sudden summer storms: full-bodied, heavy clouds over humid air, with rain or heat-lightning slicing clean through.

Instantly, it happens, from the first pressure of piano chords and vocals in “Flax”: introspection; disembodiment. Everyone around you will turn, from the first notes, to hazy apparitions held down solely by the weight of your thoughts, which can’t help but collect around them. “Flax” creates a watchful, haunting static around everything. And amazingly enough, it’s an atmosphere Barnes and Drymala manage to maintain, compellingly, song by song.

Eschewing any anchor but the occasional weight of a thought or cello, the EP is perpetually unhinging from hustle or extroversion. If anything moves it is carried by something as minute and soft-handed as “breeze” or “drift.” Elements intentionally wade, hover, murmur, or move in clean lines and etch the soundscape in string incisions. Meanwhile the people Barnes sings about—“Margaret,” even “You,” like characters in a Chagall—are suspended with the stars in expanding purple skies that seem to flood in and occupy even the smallest of bedrooms.

Wherever you are or wherever you feel deposited after the few following tracks, Gem Club have established a certainty over everything you experience in the interim. In their sound, which invokes a less climactic, less epic Sigur Rós or the more ethereal moments of Gary Jules’ “Mad World,” this particular atmosphere blooms, acquires the most subtle shifts of levity, but all in all doesn’t budge. Five seconds from any song on this EP could be five seconds from any other song on it. And that is fine, they are perfectly fine where they exist: where the simplest lurches of voice or the most sparing movement of chimes expand in your mind like the most involved daydreams—or, in the instance of “Animals” (a distant and engrossing way of watching people at a wedding party or in a musty church basement), dance at a pace that feels like it’s from another universe, a universe you’re surprised to find yourself still tethered to.

There aren’t many of them, but all elements in Gem Club create this same beautiful motion in repose, in slow-motion. And everything around you can’t help but go soft and start flickering like a slide show, a home movie projection you can’t take your eyes off. And that is fine, that is perfectly fine. - CMG

Christopher Barnes and Kristen Drymala are making a name for themselves with their reflective, autumnal odes to the past. Paints a wistful shadow through ghostly piano and cello, recalling the graceful, sepia disappointments of Perfume Genius. - NME

Christopher Barnes and Kristen Drymala are making a name for themselves with their reflective, autumnal odes to the past. Paints a wistful shadow through ghostly piano and cello, recalling the graceful, sepia disappointments of Perfume Genius. - NME

Christopher Barnes and Kristen Drymala are making a name for themselves with their reflective, autumnal odes to the past. Paints a wistful shadow through ghostly piano and cello, recalling the graceful, sepia disappointments of Perfume Genius. - NME

Christopher Barnes [Boston] - The delicate, enchanting vocals of Barnes is what makes these pieces gold coins. Using only low-key piano and hushed vocals, you better not be talking or playing with your cell phone at his shows. There will be hell to pay." - Advance Copy

Somerville, Mass., soft-focus pop duo Gem Club are Christopher Barnes and Kristen Drymala. Together, they create cavernous-sounding piano-based ballads that, despite their earthly trappings, feel truly ethereal, as if they’re being piped in from another planet bereft of gravity.” - Pitchfork

"I couldn’t ever have been a goldsmith, I’m mediocre with arts and crafts. I’m not patient enough nor tactfull with handmade things. I rather work into the coal mound, sweat for hours in the dark, alone, to find out the stone full of gold nugget… The other day, my pick sticked what I thought to be a big stone, one more. And yet, after I cleant it, I found one of the most beautiful gems. The sparkle of Gem Club is so bright, so intense, that I was totally blind then and I had to look away a few moments.” - Delicious Scopitone

“In each song on Gem Club’s Acid And Everything you can hear a dirge of the silver trails of these past moments. You can see them wrapped and coiled around the stark piano progressions and string arrangements, and guided in the gorgeous lyrics that drift in the verses and choruses. You come to see each of these songs as a lifeboat.” - Dead as Digital

Gem Club just wrote a sad and simple and beautiful song, and gave it an enigmatic title. And it feels like an antidote.”
- Tough Love Records

“i’m a little in love with these tunes. they’re simple, melodic, slow pop tunes that typically only feature the sad chords of a piano, strings, and barnes’s haunting vocals.” - Boy Attractions

“Somerville’s Gem Club are Christopher Barnes and Kristen Drymala, and they devoted themselves to wonderfully intimate and slow ballads, with a sad voice supported only by a piano, gentle strings and occasionally some subtle noises in the distance - that’s all, but that’s more than enough to create magic that leaves us baffled and spellbound.” - No Fear of Pop

Roses are beautiful and alluring, but they're often seen in the saddest of settings: hospitals, funerals. The music of Gem Club is a bit like that, mixing beauty and melancholy. One makes you appreciate the other, so it's a dynamic that works perfectly on the band's second album, appropriately titled In Roses.

Built around piano, cello and voice, Gem Club got its start a few years ago in Boston. The main voice and author of the group's woe and splendor is Christopher Barnes, who sets the tone alongside cellist Kristen Drymala and singer Ieva Berberian; together, they made some of my favorite music of 2011 on their debut full-length Breakers.

While Gem Club primarily recorded Breakers in Barnes' bedroom studio, this time they traveled to San Francisco to lay down tracks in John Vanderslice's all-analog Tiny Telephone studios. Barnes worked closely with Minna Choi, a string arranger and music director for the Magik*Magik Orchestra, the studio's de facto house band. Together, Barnes and Choi helped discover new intricacies in this music, which sounds more resplendent with more ambient passages. The voices and cello are woven together perfectly.

Gem Club's first record was a perfect late-night soundtrack, and In Roses is its perfectly elegant sequel. It'll be a close companion for thoughtful, beautiful times in 2014. - NPR