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Doors: 8PM / Show: 9PM / 21+ 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 Cohens 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 Cohens 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. In the past, Cohen made records in spells of isolation, phases when, as he puts it, he would try to make my world a lot smaller. He would play any of a dozen or so instruments until he stumbled upon something interesting, then slowly build upward and outward upon the idea. The method was solitary and stepwise, an act of accretion and deletion. Cohen, though, has been playing live with bassist Davin Givhan, drummer Josh da Costa, and keyboardist Jay Israelson in some fashion for the better part of a decade. This time around, then, he built demos in the dusty garage of the suburban Altadena rental that smelled like old wood and gasoline and tried something newhe took the songs on tour with that crew, yielding total control by letting them fill in or flourish their own parts as they saw fit. They came back home and began recording as a band. Cohen even called in a few friends to help, with Jeff Parker contributing the fluttering horn arrangement on Damage, and Parker collaborator Josh Johnson (who produced Meshell Ndegeocellos Grammy-Award-winning album The Omnichord Real Book) supplying flute, sax, and clarinet arrangements throughout the record. It felt a little bit like producing someone elses records, with Cohen given the chance to step back and evaluate others contributions to his own songs rather than scrutinize every little bit he made himself. This was a longtime ambition realized, another way of relating to others openly through sound.
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