While Madeline Dowd’s visual artwork playfully relays adult themes through childlike imagery, her band Crisman swaps the acrylics and spray paint for hazily-filtered vocals gently layered over slowcore arrangements to find yet another medium for masking emotional turmoil with innocence. To coalesce this childlike playfulness into their musical identity, Crisman teamed up with tenured Denton musicians Grahm Robinson of MAH KEE OH and Dead Sullivan’s Truman “Boone” Patrello to record the band’s self-titled debut studio album. Contrasted against the juvenility of Crisman’s paintings, the band’s collective experience is refracted throughout the measured ten-song collection. The melancholic and sinuous lead single “Surprise” pulls from childhood memories of wanting to be included and feeling misunderstood in order to lend its start-stop riffs an emotional touchstone. On “SeeYa,” the band employs acerbic distortion and twinkling arpeggios to explore the immaturity and inevitability of trying to forget a person or feeling that lingers far too long, where final single “IceeBlue” is about experiencing the infectiousness of a romance, a thematic reproduction of the song’s infectious composition. Track List: Portrait Surprise Ocean Go Cya Interlude Rock Rain Icee Blue Pawn
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