With any luck, there’s a moment in every kid’s life when listening to some song — perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the hundredth — that suddenly a line reaches through the speaker and cracks like thunder, jolting your bones with electricity, rewiring your brain and your whole understanding of what music is. A series of magical words shatters the fourth wall that heretofore has kept the concept of artistic expression through songwriting at arm’s length. Previous to this moment, music was distant and unobtrusive. Background. Like the wall color in your friend’s basement. Unknowable. Yet, for whatever reason, this line, these formerly innocuous words, unlock your comprehension. “Hey! This song is about something!” More importantly, you realize, “It’s about me!”
Identifying with a song is a rite of passage. For would-be music obsessives, once the veil is lifted, you spend the whole of your adolescence chasing that connection. These songs become the soundtrack of your life. Descendents’ “I’m the One” is your frustration with being friend-zoned. Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” is the sound of your grief. Weezer’s “Why Bother?” becomes your steely resolve against future heartbreak.
Yet it’s typically an experience associated with youth. As you age, the hits hit less deeply. You age out of the life experiences that typically inspire songs: teenage rebellion, pursuit of love, idealistic politics. As a result, you tend to live vicariously through the same music that moved you when you were young. Because nothing speaks to your life now, you focus on the things that spoke to you then.
However, one recent record has proven that, though rarer and rarer these days, it’s not impossible that a new album still rings as being “about something” and that “that something is me.”
Power Lunch is that record, and Cool Jacket’s second full-length has become every bit the soundtrack to my boring middle-aged life as Weezer’s Pinkerton was for that heartbroken 18-year-old version of me. Released back in August, Power Lunch is a 10-song collection of hook-centric ruminations on disaffection with adulthood. Or what singer/guitarist and principal songwriter Kevin England describes as “the bummers of life and being committed to working for a living.”
Over sticky, fuzzed-out riffs and Josh Lowe’s melodic basslines and grounded by drummer Derek Terry’s pulsing rhythms, England becomes an infinitely relatable voice for the all-too-familiar feelings of detachment, self-deprecation, boredom, and disappointment, delivered with a humor and an emotional intelligence which put his writing on the same level as Stephen Malkmus’ most clever lines.
“It used to be that there was lots to say,” England sings on “Fall-Risk,” “but now I’m runnin’ out of juice / And all the lines that I would write never got me any closer to the truth.”
England’s tunes aren’t political in the direct sense, but there is an element of some latent punk ethos hiding underneath the dismissive wit, the same that informed the likes of J. Mascis and Kurt Vile. It’s Rage Against the Mundane, served with a wink and a coy shrug. On “Sad Songs,” England muses on the irresistible combo of alcohol and moody music. “Comfort Me” is a heartfelt reflection. The obvious “hit” of the record may be “Be the Ride,” with its anthemic chorus of “I’ve got receipts for taking risks / I’m still unconvinced,” but the earworm repetitions over the bouncy chug of “I’m a Man” and the infectious sing-along refrain of “I want to stick needles in my eyes” (“My Glasses”) are prototypical of the myriad undeniably catchy pop melodies residing amid the album’s dry, straight-forward aesthetic.
Recorded last winter by Joel Raif (Cameron Smith, Eric Osbourne) at Modern Electric Sound Recorders, Power Lunch capitalizes on some increased fidelity but retains the comfy DIY aesthetic essential to Cool Jacket’s sound. Most artists to which the moniker has been applied bristle at the term “slack rock.” Perhaps there is an inherently derogatory element to that choice of words, but the erudite detachment associated with bands like Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. prove they are anything but slackers. Their songwriting establishes that they’re smarter than you, and you accept it as obvious. They just have a way of expressing exactly how you feel with such conviction, especially via seemingly throwaway lines. Cool Jacket do so, too. So, if you were worried that you left albums that spoke to you behind in a time when you played CDs from a Walkman into a cassette adaptor in your car stereo and want to feel something again, throw on Power Lunch and smash your head on that slack rock.
Cool Jacket
7pm Sat, Nov 15, w/Joe Gorgeous and Love Cuts at The Down ’n Out, 150 W Rosedale St, FW. DownandOutBarFW@gmail.com
