Their second album is a few top-shelf minimalist guitar racket
“I’ve acquired some questions/Filed with discontent,” Cola singer-guitarist Tim Darcy informs us on the Montreal post-punk band’s second album. Cola have their very own enjoyable little tackle trendy alienation. Laying shiny, bracing guitars over taut, tetchy, minimalist drums and bass, their sound brings to thoughts Wire and the very earliest Remedy and Echo and the Bunnymen. But the place these bands had the decaying post-industrial England of the Nineteen Seventies as a backdrop, Cola are merchandise of our personal extra ambiently dehumanized instances. “I’m a aromatic type of shadow,” Darcy sings on The Gloss, the band’s second album. His shadow-world incorporates multitudes.
Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworth have been within the wonderful, expansively off-kilter mid-2010s band Ought. In Cola, they’re joined by drummer Evan Cartwright (who has performed with U.S. Ladies and the Climate Station), they usually made an important debut in 2022 with Deep in View. Cola’s title evokes a generic client product, however it was truly impressed by one thing much more mundane: the Price of Dwelling Adjustment, a statistic utilized by authorities bureaucrats to calculate adjustments in advantages funds relative to inflation. Certainly, there’s something virtually technocratically exact within the crisp, caustic assault of songs like “Albatross” and “Pallor Tips.” However Cola are hardly misanthropic fun-haters. The guitars on The Glass might be reducing and harsh, however they’re typically type of fairly and even somewhat bit rousing. The rhythms are sharp and skeletal, but additionally propulsive and jumpy. Darcy’s singing could typically call to mind the stentorian declamations of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, however there’s additionally a pressure of petulant hot-guy brio in his voice {that a} Strokes fan would possibly acknowledge. You’ll end up head-bobbing alongside extra typically than you assume you’d with a band this low-eye-contact.
Darcy spends the album looking for buy in what Ought/Cola forebear Pere Ubu as soon as known as “the empty areas on this life,” from technological malaise (“Awakened lazy, turned on the tele/Variated wavelength has me on the prepared,” he sings on “Bell Wheel”) to passing moments of interpersonal weirdness (“You positive put collectively an sincere lie/The candy type of reportage,” he tells somebody on “Pulling Quotes”). On “All the way down to Measurement,” he wanders a hometown city panorama that’s altering so quick he can’t sustain, whereas “Reprise” frowningly surveys the panorama of twenty-something rudderlessness (“a profession in trend, ponder grad faculty”).
However Cola are too taken with their very own reducing, headlong guitar racket to get slowed down in apathy or dejection, and Darcy has a wry, self-interrogating angle in direction of his personal opaque bellyaching. “Quips don’t come out proper however the that means’s true,” he mumbles in opposition to the spartan drift of “Good Attempt.” Cola have their very own distinctive method of turning their empty areas into seas of risk.