Liz Phair, Frankie Cosmos

Wednesday, September 16 · Palace Theatre

Doors 7:00pm · Show 8:00pm

Alternative RockIndie Pop18+

★ racket - Have you heard about the big Liz Phair/Sleater-Kinney tour? Well, it’s not coming here. But let me put in a good word for St. Paul openers Frankie Cosmos. (I’ll assume you know all you need to about Phair.) Finding herself on the far side of 30 and slightly miffed that she hasn’t magically figured life out yet, onetime bedroom-pop whisperer/lead Cosmonaut Greta Kline encourages her band to assert itself ever so slightly on Frankie Cosmos’s sixth album, last year's Different Talking. Though these 17 songs would fit on one side of an old TDK with room to spare, you get the sense that Kline could stretch a song out to a whole three minutes if she wanted. But, like, what’s the point? (She tops out at an epic 2:47, FYI.) Toting around “a tote bag filled with other tote bags” in a city where “everything’s a pothole or a restaurant/And smells like pot,” she can’t “keep from acting like I’m 27” and regrets that “my bitch heart is a fucker.” But there’s something unavoidably optimistic in that bright little voice of hers, and in the way she follows up “I still don’t know what I want” with “I’ll take one of each.” Most importantly, every tune here hits home—maybe because not one of them overstays their welcome.