Cold Gawd – I'll Drown On This Earth: Album Review & Interview

Cold Gawd – I’ll Drown On This Earth

(Dais)

Out 30th August

Vinyl/DL

Buy Here

Protected by the forces of memory and armed with enough reverb to dissipate the fog that surrounds it for fear the memories might be poisonous, further fuelled by amp stacks and the hidden powers casting momentous spells and psychoactive soundscapes behind their wire mesh.

Cold Gawd present I’ll Drown On This Earth, their second album for Dais, a perfect storm from Southern California. 

An interview with the group’s Matthew Wainwright provides much insight into the creation of a hard-hitting spectrum of insurmountable beauty whereby ‘shoegaze’ is merely one section of this dense, musical topography.

It starts with a scream.

”The grand agenda is to move the cultural needle, even if it’s only an inch’’ Matthew Wainwright, principal songwriter of Cold Gawd tells me. ”Of course there’s a lot of goals in mind from touring to collaborations and even companies I’d like to work with but really what we do with these songs is art that could shift culture”.

Big statements like that must need a pretty big scream to create a shake substantial enough to encourage the tectonic plates of culture to nudge onward according to the impact of the art that initiated the shift in the first place. A scream can be an ambiguous thing. A scream of insanity. A scream of delight. A scream of despair. A scream of utmost joy. Genre can be ambiguous too. Shoegaze can scream. Scream until the chemistry between the bodies being absorbed by its noise wall virtually dissolves into a firework display of particles. Hardcore can scream. It can vibrate and erupt with a kind of intense, primal energy that pumps blood through the veins in a testosterone fix of rapid guitars and feral rhythms. Hip-hop can scream too – it can howl. Its various underground crews of linguists, visionary beat makers and worldwide-revered linchpins scream to establish some kind of authority in the playgrounds of an industry, to establish their presence, to defy expectations, to confirm their unequivocal talent.

They have to. Like punks have to scream to stop themselves from being twatted. Like shoegazers have to scream as they are sucked through a portal pushed into the floor by their delay pedals. Like hip-hop artists scream to prove the point that what they do is a matter of life and death, that they’re here, here to stay, to take over, to not just turn the industry on its head, but to divide and conquer and build an industry for themselves, so too, does Cold Gawd, more than a compound of these distinct subcultures, but a hybrid of the extremity of the scream that connects them together, scream. You never know unless you try. Be cheeky. Steal it. Big statements shouldn’t be feared for being spoken aloud. Big statements shouldn’t be ‘big’. Ambition is refreshing. Humility is boring. Stab it.

”I remember watching how popular autotune became but as we all know it didn’t start that way. T-Pain went from the man to most hated overnight and some people were through with ye, musically, after 808s but looking back on that now is crazy because you cannot escape anything with auto/hard Melodyne. Maybe we will or won’t accomplish something that huge but even if we change how people dress in our world that’s the needle moving” Wainwright says. ”Truthfully the blueprint for ambition comes from rap because you see how Jay Z, Tyler, or Westside Gunn started with nothing but from the jump they always thought that whatever they wanted they could go get and that’s how I feel. We may not be hustling towards entering the beverage industry but a CLD GWD SZN store on York Blvd in Highland Park has got a nice ring to it”.

Cold Gawd began with Wainright in 2020. He had been holding onto some songs for a few year as well as a good amount of Covid unemployment and routine stimulus checks. Then comes 2021 and the first round of good mixes for their sophomore record, God Get Me The Fuck Out of Here from 2021. ”I began reaching out to homies and asking them if they wanted to help me flesh out the live band and now in 2024 we got a few records and tours under our belts as well as the most solid lineup we’ve ever had”.

Now consisting of Brandon Aviles, Cameron “Duck” Burris, Cameron Fonacier, Arturo Ramirez, Devin Trott and Wainwright, the band has extra layers of flesh thrown onto the bones, taking it into unparalleled dimensions of dynamic intricacy and anthem electricity. The six of them inject their own touches and flourishes into the tunes. ”Even though I still wrote most of the record, songs like Nudism don’t exist without Brandon lending his expertise on synths and drum machines. All My Life wouldn’t have ever been finished if not for Devin creating the chord progression on the bridge or Cam making those drums from scratch a week before we started recording. On top of all of this everyone had input on parts staying or going or how vocal melodies could go”.

Since their last record, the band had only been used to playing shows in Southern California really. ‘’We made it to Vegas and Arizona but all of our shows were only ever two hours away from home” Wainwright says. Now having toured the US with Mareux, the West Coast and back a few times, they have also been to Canada and become a closer unit. ”From our live show to even our dynamic internally has become so much better” he adds. ”Back in 2022, we took the band seriously but everything was a party, that’s not to say we don’t have fun now, but what I’m saying is drink tickets aren’t the be-all and end-all they used to be”.

Understanding that a little catharsis comes with being crushed as part of the territory (and vice versa), the album is a sonic composite of all those ideas, working the wheels of the same machine, the absence of one capable of undoing the threads woven throughout the essence of the tunes. A body needs a brain. A body needs a heart. A body needs to scream. ‘Shoegaze is a prison’. Quite the catchy aphorism adorned on the band’s limited run of t-shirts. Then let the body be free from the floor it is chained to. Up!

A formidable confluence of setting concrete and a spell to crack it apart, a perfect hallucination of darkness and light, opener Gorgeous gorges on the senses via a thick spillage of guitars, serrated and soporific whirling from great heights yet wrapping themselves around us. It erupts and trembles with juggernaut drums and vocals, both autotuned and angelic, shattering and reassembled in the same immense launch before all eventually dissipates into a landscape of contemplative ambience. Next, Portland crackles and a bass fresh from being forged in a furnace powering a city veiled by a spree of rain that intensifies the streetlights peppered upon each abandoned isle. Burning up with too-hot-to-handle guitars and vocals that mimic each other’s melodic refrain, reinforcing that childlike dreaminess, that sense of curiosity and disbelief in what has crash landed into, and through, the passing frames of everyone’s lives keeps us fully immersed in the sound world of the tune. Wainwright’s vocal prowess flutters and oscillates between a sudden bullet of bright light singes itself against a celestial sphere and reflecting over everything, a disco ball spinning as it would be fastened to a ceiling by a piece of string in outer space and a meteorite strike sent down to shake earth into a pile of ashes, bricks and branches.

To say this I’ll Drown This Earth is an alchemical splice of hardcore and shoegaze would be a fatal oversight, ignorant to all those hallucinogenic hip-hop battles scattered throughout the planet-cracking dirge of each warped tune. Each explosion is made up of so much more than meets the ear. It leans into the realm behind the eyes, within the lungs, rendering us weightless as we are rescued from the armchair and levitate upwards through the air, towards cold space.

To summarise the record’s controlled barrage of chaos as being contained in a stitch shared between genres reduces, even ruins the sheer magnitude of the emotional components involved, the spiritual reverie, the dramatic magnetism kicking pillars in the crotch that uphold monolithic structures, slicing ancient trees through the knees until all their roots are upturned and exposed for all to see. With that in mind, does Cold Gawd perceive the music they make through some sort of stylistic filter with a shoegaze or hardcore or hip hop or post those two genre classifications applied like a lens through which they look? There’s craft here. But also intuition and enough of it to uniquely express what they seek without worrying about the honesty of their homage to their stylistic antecedents. ‘’I’ve always said we’re rappers who decided to pick up jazzmasters. All we want to do is express the feelings we get when we hear something atmospheric and dreamy while also dressing as fly as we can within our own styles’’ Wainwright states. ”I may not be able to write lyrics as hard as Jay Rock’s verse in Money Trees but I could write a fuzzed-out bridge that could be just as exciting’’.

Ramirez’s screams add a nice touch to the voluminous scale of the sonic onslaught. There are musical counterpoints as well as vocal counterpoints appearing and popping up throughout. The merging (and melting) of genres into their various subcategories is a continually fascinating (though no less difficult and desirable) wormhole of many musical groups – the thrill of the case is what satiates the thirst, to escape exact replication that pales in comparison to the origin of the species is a heinous and laughable act. Cold Gawd escapes this by compressing the extremities of the scenes they come from but with a sense of sensitivity and vehemence. Rather than drenching the whole thing in reverb and slapping on some autotune which might make it more gruesome and extraneous than is capable of being put into the typed word. ”I’d say our big elements are the guitar leads and how the vocals interplay with them as well as the melodies of those vocals” Wainwright states. ”There was an old Whirr interview years ago where Nick talked about when they recorded the Around EP, Jack Shirley had mentioned how good the guitar leads were and that always stuck with me so whenever I write one of my main focuses is making sure the guitar lead is like a hook. Making it as memorable as the words in a chorus”.

Shoegaze from Southern California doesn’t do the grind and chug of the record any favours and Drake producing Deftones doing a Duster covers EP. An understatement to say this is a suturing or splicing together of styles but has a distinct, contemporary edge absolutely right and ripe to express the human condition according to how heavy it weighs into the ribcage of the here and now (an avid, even devout fan of hip-hop before anything else may spring to mind, probably why the tunes sound so rich is their attention to detail in their stratospheric, sample-mashed and mixed-up colour collisions) but perhaps a reductive overstatement to say ‘this thing sounds like this thing’.

Inspiration has to derive from somewhere. It finds us. Then sometimes it hides in the back rooms of our minds. Other inspirations, other activities, other interests creep into our lives, seep into our system, we become an outward representation of what has been assimilated on an inward level, we externalise the input and harbour what has been absorbed. Inspiration is frustrating. We find it, we fall in love, we never feel the same way again. We chase it. Decades die. We’re adamant that our dedication to the pursuit, and retrieval of those innocent years, is worth it. ”I’m glad you’ve picked up on those things. Of course, there’s a lot of music, movies, paintings, etc. that inspire the work but my biggest inspiration is to try to capture how I felt about music in 2014. In 2014 I was 18 years old, graduated high school and everything was new and exciting. In 2014 there was so much to discover and most of it all was so good so I want to capture that energy and let it show through anything we make’’ says Waintight.
”It felt like so much was starting and popping at the same time, days before Rodeo came out that year, Guilty of Everything came out that year, Never Hungover Again dropped, I also went to Chicago for the first time that year. Every moment felt exciting and maybe I’m just not tapped in how I used to be but the only exciting moments that I’ve seen change people is the Donda rollout and Brat, which is great because I love both of those albums but it felt like there was way more heart in this shit back then’’.

There was a period of time in between the album being written and being recorded. A period of refinement. A helpful and reflective period that influenced the strength of the album, the result of Wainwright’s confidence in what was demoed being bolstered by the acceptance of its brilliance by the larger group fold. ‘’Thematically at the beginning of when I wrote the album, it was going to be another “woe is me” sort of thing but in that time I was able to experience more love and beautiful things and now the record is a lot softer and sweeter with the messages I’m trying to get across’’ states Wainwright. ‘’Musically the songs that were demoed stayed the same but in the time between demo and recording I showed the songs to the guys every few months to make sure they were all comfortable with what was going to come out. I can write anything and say it’s the shit but it’s good to have the rest of the gang around to offer their perspective to see if the song is sick or if it needs anything’’.

With I’ll Drown On This Earth, things appear not to move, things appear to not adhere to any sort of temporal structure. Yet things equally appear to fade as fast as they arrive. Dumbfounded by the spellbinding episode we have recently endured. They have that surrealist, notebook-in-a-daydream aura to them forcing us to question how safely planted they are in reality, or if there is the desire to reach past the skin and bones that this dimension encases our abilities to dream inside. In this way, the lyrical content can almost be a lullaby – so too, the sentiments that rumble and fizz within them, escape any potential attempts to castigate them as ‘soppy romantic drizzle’ – because of they appear to be fragments snatched from the peak of a waking dream. Psychedelic in a way. It’s Magritte’s ‘this is not a pipe’ etched into a wall of hot noise and domestic canticles, the impossible object mused over by countless artists, reality right there (where?) to be challenged.

All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned For Things I Cannot Name explodes until a title as empty as that has no choice but to become full. Violence and ambience, acid and tranquillity, it drones onward, a repeated, intravenous electric melody sings and spirals like vapour trails through an effluvium of wild smog, endless, an angel in a car crash, a statue escaping the stone, mellifluous yet erupting more and more upon every heave and seismic swell. Maybe it empties the title, it was already a balloon the size of the universe about to burst and stain a fissure across the skyline. Similar in its surrealism, Duchamp is my Lawyer hunts from afar, an unabating barrage of sludge-puddle drums, earthen mounds and ethereal layers of electric guitars and intense bass thrills palpitating in the same transcendent knot of kineticism. The next moment, the whole room peels itself away to reveal an entirely different scene, slow as fire hydrant shadows stared into the streets by the sun above it. A stormy torrent of smelted instruments evaporated by the same radioactive beam.
Elsewhere, the dynamic post-hardcore chug of Malibu Beach House weathers all its rickety bones will allow on the psychic seafront. A tumultuous conversation in the middle of a musical starburst. Tappan’s spidery guitar stutters birth a more hushed, meditative moment. It’s joined by warm illuminations of bass that rumble and roam around in the back room like a messy nest of antique fairy lights making themselves known. A dizzying, yet sparse headrush of drums both dismantle and enlarge themselves as the whole photograph develops before finally fading to a fragile gaze of phosphorescent spectrality.

”So the name for Duchamp comes from a quote from Virgil Abloh were he says ‘Duchamp is my lawyer’ meaning in everything he makes, if he’s to be questioned on it he has Marcel Duchamp to call back to and say ‘well this is art right? So what I make is art.’ The lyrics for that one are loosely based around a time where I almost drowned on a shitty church camp retreat to the inside of the Grand Canyon” Wainwright explains. ”All My Life, Malibu and Bird in Space are all lyrically about my relationship. All My Life is all the sweet lines you can have with your partner to let them know you love them during the day, Malibu is the tender ‘let’s grow old’ together shit you talk about at night over a good meal or in bed and Bird is the deep in my heart feeling I have for her, that sorta shit you don’t usually say out loud but the things you do say are inspired by”.

Additionally, the speed at which the lyrics were written matches the moods evoked throughout the album. Written the week before entering the studio to record them, they sound like the perfect amount of time, a distance elapsed between the experiential impetus that triggered the memory of what makes us want to write, and also that actual experience fading away – a wound healing over, or staying unadulterated by the plights of time, the plagues of emotional destitute and inevitability of physical decline – a bed still being shared by someone you love. ”I was really hard on myself about the lyrics is really why it took so long. I have a note in my phone with a lot of lyrics in them whether it’s lines, stanzas or full songs so lyrics were there but I would go in and revise over and over again because I wanted to make sure I was telling my truth as well as saying shit that hit home the way Kyle Soto (of Seahaven) or Victoria Legrand (of Beach House) do for me’’ confesses Wainwright. ‘’Their words feel so important so in turn I had to make something just as meaningful. It also helped that a week before recording vocals I had the right-off-the-board mixes which helped give the songs new life and ultimately motivated me to finish the lyrics”.

Nudism tracks a sonic boom sliding back and forth through the silent streets of Tokyo. Fresh from ending, or about to begin, trapped by an absence of any inference that it might be a certain time of day. An electronic blubbering of drums and percussion claps and crackles around it before the whole surrealistic moment: ‘our time got lost/in days we’ll never see’ a script for a silent film, lapping and looping the same shot is punctuated by a piano playing itself (with the swing set in the backyard as its audience) as the last fizzing ember is sucked through the convex transmitter eyeballing everything in Bird in Space.

This concluding tune unfurls as a dense grind of astral strings, hit and shimmer with bullets moving through the breeze in slow motion. It gales hard as curtains part, machines melt, sparks dance to thunderstorm drums all searing hot and brewing above the high voltage cables behind the sky start to hum, encouraged to persevere in the pursuit of all that was hypothesised to be bulletproof in the scriptures of fated romance: ‘’in life/all I need/is that guiding light’’, an illusion of a gift that keeps on giving (addictions of numerous varieties, anxiety-disorders, panic-attacks, trust issues) entombed in trenches of wrapping paper: ‘I’d like to run away/and find you/there’.

On I’ll Drown On This Earth, there’s a sense of adventure and abstraction, dreaming and desire, fantasy and infatuation with the unattainable charging throughout it. With ‘mad scientist’ Colin Knight (of post-punk band, Object of Affection) producing who meticulously microscope and laboured over the tonal qualities of the record, in some cases spending over an hour to consider snare sounds and autotune possibilities, somewhere between intimate mind-fuck introspection and infernal, nihilistic rage where all the boundaries are obliterated but the vision – and the words, bring back to a nuanced focal point.

”The theme is finding love and beauty in whatever you got around you. The world is fucked, it’s over, everything that gets pushed onto us is depraved, soulless, and sold to us like we don’t have the agency of choice anymore” he says. ”So in that, you really do have to work as hard as you can to find the beautiful parts of life and hold onto them dearly because the rest of what’s out there is bullshit. So for me, the beautiful things are my relationship, the beach house discography, my friends, tasteful clothes and living in Southern California. There’s even beauty in being comfortable with the end, whether it’s my own death or the collapse of man to touch on the outlier track that Duchamp is. We have to be uncomfortable with the unknown right? I got hope for the unknown, whatever is out there that I’ve yet to experience”.

Yet – as we have established, as much with the increasingly significant catalogue of this very group, a group about touching the raw nerves, the young veins, wild eyes turned to hollow glass, spoiled and poisoned by years of chasing the tails of strangers fabled to be lovers, a first kiss that suddenly starts to taste like ipecac syrup and an empty stomach, some odyssey of impossible extremes, ventures that age the face by decades of hunting high and low for the ascertaining of a particular muse, there is always a darkness waiting to remove the rug from underneath our feet, and rip our legs off whilst doing so as the rainbow’s overgrown end spans farther upon each widening stride: ‘It’s so distant/whilst I’m moving’.

Yet that’s all part of their genius: keeping the light ahead well-lit, to balance out the darkness that smothers the road towards it.

It ends with a scream.

”Everybody out here with guitar or pedal deals and I’m tryna be the one making a new silhouette over at new balance. Gotta make a new shoe part of the gaze uniform so all these ratty boots get the fuck out of here”.

Ends with that actually.

Cold Gawd | Instagram | Bandcamp

Dais | Website | Instagram

Words by Ryan Walker