VINCE SKELLY and Stevie Pohlman belong to some kind of alternate reality where the internet never sucked the fun out of music. They’re the founders of Portland’s newest record label, See My Friends Records. The duo’s inaugural release is a 12-inch compilation, Secret City Volume 1, which features some of the best pop music currently being made in Portland. It’s an effort that brings to mind NME‘s C86 cassettes and Flying Nun Records’ Dunedin Double EP. A more current and local example is Magic Marker’s terrific guitar-pop-centric A House Full of Friends.
Plenty of modern compilations take pride in being stylistically all encompassing, but Secret City Volume 1 succeeds in its specificity. Being specific is a huge part of See My Friends’ mission statement: “We wanted to start with this really small group of bands we were in that all happened to live within a mile of each other in Southeast Portland,” says Pohlman. “It’s not representative of Portland as a whole at all, it’s just one little micro-scene in one neighborhood, which for me is a great example of how Portland has too many good bands for how small it is.”
Like the name implies, Secret City Volume 1 feels like its own contained universe—a characteristic all great indie comps share. “The reason we chose these bands is because we’re all close, good friends,” says Skelly. It’s that effortless sense of camaraderie that unites Secret City‘s songs into a single, continuous whole. There are no gaps between tracks, and one could almost be fooled into thinking that Mope Grooves and Honey Bucket—Pohlman and Skelly’s projects, respectively—are the same band.