Longtime friends in real life, Seattle residents Ceci Gomez and Kessiah Gordon started making songs together in 2014, collecting cyberspace oddities, samples, and other online artifacts in a desktop folder titled "Black Hole" and gleefully mixing sounds together using computer programs Logic and Ableton, gradually shaping the messy sound collages into cohesive songs. Talk to Me So I Can Fall Asleep, the duo's first album under the band name Crater, examines miscommunication and the various aspects of relationships in the post-internet era. Gomez begins the album by blaming the internet before proclaiming that we're all trapped on a "Sick Sad World" on the next song. On heart-tugging standout "Ain't Right," she pleads "I'm gonna beg you not to love me," and she asks her lover to take good care of her and dance with her on closing number "Brew." Musically, the album resembles the electro-pop of Chvrches and MS MR (whom Crater toured with), but the duo take a slightly more experimental approach, adding some glitches to the vocals and letting some of the samples and beats feel messy and a bit chaotic. The duo cover ground ranging from uptempo dance-pop ("Hardly at All", "Lucky Lucy") to sludgy trip-hop ("Habits Die Slow") to punchy left-field pop ("Gross Relations") to ecstatic chillwave ("Brew"), and some of the tracks at the end of the album add a bit of an ethereal goth flavor, with Gomez's strong, expressive voice containing shades of early Elizabeth Fraser or Siouxsie Sioux. The album strikes a nice balance between radio-friendly pop sheen and unpredictable weirdness, adding up to a very promising start for the duo. ~ Paul Simpson, Rovi

1		Crater Head
2		Sick Sad World
3		Ain't Right
4		Habits Die Slow
5		Summer Skin
6		Gross Relations
7		Hardly at All
8		Lucky Lucy
9		Badlands
10		Holy Ground
11		Brew

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