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Chris Cohen’s Paint a Room is an absolute joy, but it’s the uncanny kind of joy, the kind which can challenge you and perhaps make you see the world in a different way.
If it’s true that we are the sum total of our experiences then Chris Cohen is something of an alternative music titan. The guitarist, drummer and songwriter spent much of the mid-noughties with indie darlings Deerhoof before lending his extensive talents to Cass McCombs, Brooklyn psych-folkers White Magic, gospel-pop act Danielson and Japanese avant-garde overlords Maher Shalal Hash Baz. He records under the pseudonym The Curtains and as part of the band Cryptacise, and as a session musician or producer with Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. The man has done a lot, and most of it has been very good.
But what if a person – an artist, if we were to narrow it down – is more than a box containing the combined past events of a life? Perhaps there is a single ineffable spark that ignites the present without throwing those past experiences into shadow. Cohen seems better equipped than most to nurture this creative flame. His solo albums, of which Paint a Room is the fourth, each seem to exist in their own present, a place where time is slightly slower, where influences and experiences are insinuated rather than brashly presented. The songs on Paint a Room are what we talk about when we talk about timelessness. Opener Damage sits somewhere between nostalgic 1970s soft rock and artsy, experimental pop. It’s full of quirky, soft-focus horns (a Jeff Parker arrangement) and comforting melodicism, but all the while it exists against a lyrical backdrop of state violence and political unease.
While this kind of music shares some similarities with hypnagogic pop, Cohen’s take on it has none of the assumed superiority, the snide bitterness or the inherent sarcasm of the more recent work of Ariel Pink (who, back when he was still making decent records, was another Cohen collaborator). Instead, Paint the Room anchors its wide-ranging lyrical concerns in a music that is warm and accommodating, though never overly twee. The title track has a scattering of flutes, like some lost baroque pop gem. Sunever is a beautiful celebration of a transgender child’s identity, a kind of folk-funk exaltation. Cobb’s Estate passes by in a sun-dappled dream-pop shimmer, with guitars that sound like Galaxie 500 relocated to a late-sixties Laurel Canyon utopia, while Wishing Well is a Byrds-type jangle filtered through a near-imperceptible gauze of dreamy production.
There are more overtly experimental moments too: the opening vocal section of Laughing, for example, which leads into a hazy, brassy, slowed-down tropicalia, or Physical Address, which uses phrases cut from the unemployment forms Cohen had to fill in at the start of the Covid pandemic, and which turn, surprisingly, into one of the album’s most playful, upbeat moments. Dog’s Face combines glassy piano with a subtle phased effect, a disarmingly simple melody and an unexpectedly jarring guitar break to create something both sweet and disconcerting.
Night and Day is an unashamedly poppy shuffle, but Cohen’s voice has the soft confidence of Nick Drake, and once again, the guitar cuts against the grain just enough to make things interesting. Final track, Randy’s Chimes, sets off little psychedelic bursts of noise like underwater fireworks. These incredibly subtle, perfectly judged components of instrumentation or production occur in pretty much every song and serve as interruptions to the album’s narrative, which, on the face of it, is warm and glowing and contented. This, in turn, reminds us that, among its many purposes, music can pacify and it can protest. In Cohen’s capable hands, it can do both of these things at once. Paint a Room is an absolute joy, but it’s the uncanny kind of joy, the kind which can challenge you and perhaps make you see the world in a different way.
Paint a Room (12th July 2024) Hardly Art
Bandcamp: https://chriscohen.bandcamp.com/album/paint-a-room
