CHRIS COHEN was always a quiet kid. In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddlerto 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 didnt 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 Damage, the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-traced jangle Laughing. With 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.
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