Description

A rhythmic trio with a building and repetition-led sound, similar to Hookworms, Vision Fortune, Women, Deerhunter, Woven Bones, Thee Oh Sees and Peepholes.

Cold Pumas hail from Brighton, land of windswept piers, and have been abiding by the three Rs since their inception : Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. Yet their début long-player, Persistent Malaise is the result of an internal aeon of transient rebirths. Split release between Faux Discx, Gringo Records and Italian Beach Babes, the album is both a metronomic cathedral of married noise and a funnel of kraut-tinged catharsis. It arrives preceded by a wave of 7s, including splits with Male Bonding and Women, that have captured the taught and at times nascent evolution of this trio of fraternal pedants.

As opined by the albums name, Persistent Malaise, the sonic unease is at times betrayed deliberately by its rhythmic crux. Indeed, several juxtapositions lie between the persistence of those invigorating textural showers, the locked cadences of the songs and the underpinning of lyrics retelling the ubiquitous dread of a relationships decline. It feels at times like being the lone watcher of a party slowly decaying around oblivious guests. Far lyrically denser than any of the bands previous work, there appears a correlation with this and the apparent reconciliation of a structure that the band had for so long divorced. Still blessed and obedient towards those former Rs, Persistent Malaise could not have been born as a pop album, but it is infinitely more engaging and satisfying for that conflict, for those about-turns that find songs like Fog Cutter grating hypnotically into inception, rising and falling in the same crystalline loop of a pathetic, monotone discourse on the fidelity and rationale of romantic memory. And yet in another light the song remains the bands starkest number to date a punk-themed gala of minimal crescendos of fervent guitar that do not abate, thickening into a shimmering coda beneath the uncompromising downstrokes.

Sherry Island, a thematically lurid paean to a Jazz Age Hallows Eve, filters in through a taught and insular motorik envelope, jolting with queerly lush purpose into a body of a song replete with the inverted sixties nuances of kindred bands like Women, before slowing woozily to a halt, as if the record itself has run aground. The albums elongated closer, Vanishing Point, begins a drone-filled dirge and yet springs suddenly at its own point of fallibility into a cascade of dolorous low end and squalling fuzz, obliquely in rapture to Sonic Youth perhaps, the frequencies pushed beyond each further threshold at the close of endless repeats.

It is these diversities which continue to captivate, Persistent Malaise remains somehow rhythmically succinct and entrancing, its textures eked at times to visceral sonic limits but always gripped urgently to the tails of that metronomic spectre, its voice splaying the same relentless disclosures again and again.