Death and Vanilla welcome newcomers to their strange trip with a short, sugary EP

The Malmö natives drifted with a dark surf-noir vibe on their debut self-titled EP, but this spring’s proper debut To Where The Wild Things Are found them branching out and expanding, playing with light and dark, with necessary distortions and shadow and shape. Over the course of those ten songs, they showed how far their Broadcast-meets-60’s-psychedelia aspirations could take them.

Intentional or not, it was also perfectly titled. The album was split in half: sweet and poppy to begin before descending into ever more ominous territory. It was a black mirror for the Spike Jonze adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s story. Sometimes the monsters love you so much they want to eat you up… and sometimes they just want to fucking eat you.

But the unsettling synths and unusual chord progressions that give the second half its stormy vibe are largely absent in album highlights "California Owls" and "Follow The Light", replaced by glowing mellotrons and the pleasant ringing of a dulcimer. Those two tracks are emblematic of just how bright and welcoming the trio's combination of muffled, barely there vocals and gentle psychedelic swoons can be. It makes sense, then, that they’ve been repackaged here as a shorter, more welcoming invitation to potential fans that may have missed (or been intimidated by the runtime of) To Where The Wild Things Are.

The short interlude "Erté" follows, a scant fifty-seven seconds that bridges the old material with newcomer “Reality From Dream”. It’s here that the band make good on that “Death” business. Disparate elements—operatic background vocals, the scratch of an old record left too long on the needle, the chimes of hand bells, and Marleen Nilsson’s flittering voice—are brought together and condense in a march to the River Styx.

While there’s little that fans of the trio’s previous work haven’t already heard, the California Owls EP serves as an accessible introduction to a promising band that may have flown under the casual listener’s radar.