Chris Cohen
Paint A Room
Californian singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Chris Cohen has decades of experience as an in-demand wingman and principal player. Some know him through his production and session work for Cass McCombs, Weyes Blood and Kurt Vile, others through his years as guitarist with experi-pop titans Deerhoof and his own art-rock band, The Curtains. Yet he has also established a solo career spanning four albums, the latest of which is his first in five years.
Recorded with a quartet playing in real time, Paint A Room is a collection of pastoral jazz-pop songs with a vague, vintage-folk sheen. Its sweet and gentle tracks brim with unaffected emotion and an undeniable charm. Cohen’s wistful, murmurous voice heightens the yesteryear feel, as do the elegant phrasings and arrangements – John Martyn, Sade, Milton Nascimento and Nick Drake have all left an impression – but this is no throwback set. Cohen’s songs are very much of the 21st century, as the controlled unfolding of both ‘Damage’ and ‘Laughing’, and the t(w)angled cross currents of guitar in ‘Dog’s Face’ attest. The use of sax, flute and clarinet throughout provides the icing on a moreish cake.
Out now.
Label: Hardly Art
Cassandra Jenkins
My Light, My Destroyer
“I think you’ve mistaken my desperation for devotion,” sings Cassandra Jenkins at the start of her third album. It’s the kind of droll comment Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers or Faye Webster might make, but whilst there is some attitude overlap, Jenkins’ songs seem rooted in a deep wonderment at our existence and delight in life’s everyday details, even though they point to alone-ness more often than communion.
Jenkins is a uniquely present observer of her self, whether she’s visiting a pet shop to “stare into the sideways gaze of a lizard” (‘Petco’), working at a florist’s, where flowers remind her of another’s eyes (‘Delphinium Blue’) or in a hotel room musing on William Shatner’s voyage into space (‘Aurora, IL’). These observations are set to an exquisitely moody pop soundtrack that feels more experimental than her aforementioned peers: there are snatches of random noise, instrumental interludes and notably, a recorded conversation with her mother, who points out planets and constellations as they watch the night sky together. Stray notes of Mercury Rev, Adrianne Lenker and Talk Talk drift through, alongside echoes of Jenkins’ alt-rock past, but My Light, My Destroyer casts its own irresistible shadow.
Out now. Label: Dead Oceans
Bad With Phones
Crash
Bassist, producer and self-proclaimed “ex-hacker” Manny Deroy (aka Emmanuel Folorunso) released a full-length debut album under his Bad With Phones alias in 2021. Marinade was aptly titled, an R&B-pop set steeped in myriad flavours – psychedelia, whacked-out funk, hip hop, alt-rock and bedroom folk – that announced an intriguing new voice.
His follow-up consolidates this sound. Again, tracks are rooted in Deroy’s experience, which here includes a serious car accident while on holiday in Lanzarote. He wasn’t injured but he did take a two-year break from music, which might explain why the 10-track Crash presents as a more focused and considered project. It explores familiar themes – desire (on the insistent ‘Drive’, which suggests Bloc Party with blurred edges, and the explicit ‘Emmanuelle’), jealousy (the trap-edged ‘Dennis Rodman’) and the pressures applied by expectation (‘In A Week (Anything Can Happen)’ – without lapsing into cliché. An acknowledgment of The Weeknd in ‘Monica Too’, for example, is subverted with 90s grunge-pop guitar. Deroy’s moniker may suggest an artist in a none-more-Millennial bubble, but Crash is both universal and refreshingly distinctive.
Out now.
Label. Don’t Sleep
Oneida
Expensive Air
For those who’ve followed their career, Oneida are as emblematic of New York City as the Empire State Building and Katz’s Deli. The Brooklyn quintet have been going since 1997, and their history is packed with bristling, pent-up energy and wild experimental noise.
Expensive Air is their 17th album. It lands just two years after Success, which featured the group’s most playful and celebratory songs to date. Oneida are still high on that energy rush, though darkness and claustrophobia have also crept in. The songs started life with melodic structure, as is evident on the gothic synth-grunge of the title track, ‘Here It Comes’ (think Teenage Fanclub, roughed up by Sugar) and the addictively see-sawing ‘Salt’. OthersOthers plunder the full range of 70s rock, with off-key guitar licks, swathes of white noise, textured synth and the players’ improv tendencies running free. Highlights are the Hawkwind-swept juggernaut of ‘Reason To Hide’ and the jazzy slam-punk of ‘La Plage’.
Out now.
Label: Joyful Noise
