Chris Cohen - As If Apart - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Chris Cohen's songs initially sound easy. They're each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace, but dig a little deeper and you'll reach a melancholy core. His previous two albums - 2012's Overgrown Path, and 2016's As If Apart - were built from rich, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your subconscious, like they'd always been there. Chris Cohen, his third solo album, is a thoughtful, accomplished meditation on life and family, backed by dusky instrumentation influenced by the late evening beauty of Pat Metheny's Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack, and Thomas Dolby's Golden Age of Wireless. It's beautiful, but it's also unflinching in it's depiction of emotional turmoil. Mastered by Bernie Grundman and written and recorded in his Lincoln Heights studio and at Tropico Beauties in Glendale, California over the course of the last two years with the help of Katy Davidson (Dear Nora), Luke Csehak (Happy Jawbone Family Band), Zach Phillips, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, it is his most straightforward album yet, but it is also the conclusion of an unofficial cycle that began with Overgrown Path. Album Tracks 1. Song They Play 2. Edit Out 3. Green Eyes 4. Sweet William 5. House Carpenter 6. Twice in a Lifetime 7. What Can I Do 8. The Link 9. Heavy Weather Sailing 10. No Time to Say Goodbye

Album Tracks 1. Monad 2. Solitude 3. Caller No 99 4. Rollercoaster Rider 5. Heart Beat 6. Optimist High 7. Inside a Seashell 8. Don't Look Today 9. Open Theme

Chris Cohen was always a quiet kid. In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddler-to communicate without speaking, to identify with others without the direct representation of words. It has worked, too, with Cohen's terrific stint in the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art-rock act The Curtains, preceding production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. Somewhere along that long way, Cohen started writing lyrics. He found that, though it didn't come naturally, the process offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way to see himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three twilit albums of casually complicated pop during the last decade radiated these epiphanies handling family strife, navigating advancing age, and understanding social woes. But Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on Paint a Room, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen's meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. There is the endless miasma of state violence on the subversively melodious opener InchDamage,Inch the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-traced jangle InchLaughingInch this is Cohen communicating with friends not only through his deep understanding of groove, harmony, and hook but also with his listeners through songs that croon of our uneasy little era. On Paint a Room, Cohen's music feels like a warm spring breeze, easy to love and gentle to feel. But it's often carrying something heavy, as if blowing in from some unseen storm cloud. Paint a Room both reckons with reality and conjures an alternate one, where nighttime walks and a neighbor's wind chimes offer endle