Foggy Notion: Chris Cohen

präsentiert von ByteFM

Chris Cohen has always been a quiet child. In fact, this introversion was one of the reasons he started making music as a toddler - to communicate without speaking, to identify with others without the direct display of words. It worked, too, with Cohen's terrific time with the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art rock band The Curtains, before production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren and Marina Allen. At some point along this long road, Cohen began writing lyrics. He found that the process, though not something he was born with, offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way of looking at himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three dodgy albums of casually complicated pop from the last decade exuded these epiphanies: dealing with family conflict, coming to terms with advancing age and understanding social ills.

But Cohen has never had so much to sing about directly as on Paint a Room, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen's meanings previously lurked in the mosaic-like musical layers he built on his own, here they're new and clear, enlivened and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. There's the endless miasma of state violence on the subversively melodic opener "Damage", the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-infused jangle "Laughing": here Cohen communicates with friends not only through his deep understanding of groove, harmony and hook, but also with his listeners through songs that crow of our troubled little times.