Tune in on Thursday, June 27th @ 6pm when Roscoe 2000 speaks with Bay Area based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist, Chris Cohen, ahead of his upcoming show at The Chapel in SF on Thursday, July 25th.
Chris Cohen has plied the inside and outside folds of pop musical possibility since at least 1978, when he first set infant drumstick to skin at the tender age of three, initiating decades of sonic experimentation across multiple bands and nearly a dozen recordings.
On July 12th, Cohen will release his fourth full length album, Paint a Room, on Hardly Art.
This time around, Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on Paint a Room, his first album in five years. 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”: 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.
Paint a Room both reckons with reality and conjures an alternate one, where nighttime walks and a neighbor’s wind chimes offer endless escapes for the imagination, space for the mind to roam. Sublime and sunlit, these 10 songs consider dreamy new ways out of old predicaments, clearly stating the problem and dancing and singing their way somewhere new.
Photo: Kate Garner
