Kopper – Luminescent Womb
Kopper sounds like the smart, mysterious student who joins school late and does everything right in order to earn the attention of their classmates. These sort of people inevitably end up wearing fancy beards, drinking fancy coffee and talking about philosophy endlessly in an unexcited, hushed tone of voice.
Sometimes they make music. And, while as pretentious as you’d expect them to sound, the quality of their songs and recordings are, as in the case of Kopper, impossible to ignore. This is music about weighty topics made to sound Delphic and profound. The visuals certainly add to this feeling. However, a good song is a good song. Critics often give poor reviews to artists whose style offends their sensibilities and likely regret it later. Did they really have to pick on Three Dog Night when they were filling giant stadiums?
Luminescent Womb is the kind of song that makes you utter words like “organic” and “kale” for no reason, stripping you of your sense of personal freedom. It makes you want to start conversations about Nietzsche with people down by the dog park. It’s time to expand your minds.
Western Threads – Cowboy in Montmartre
There are a few styles of guitar music where the better you play, the less chance you have of earning any respect. Messing up chords, or having band members start different songs if you’re a punk band, is charming. Messing up solos in a thrash band is not.
The kind of indie rock that was started by the arthouse Velvet Underground prizes concept overplaying, even if the band members of that particular group could certainly be proficient if they chose to do so. However, it was the clever writing and the imagery that seemed to belong to a great, strange short story that made them amazing.
Western Threads works in much the same way on Cowboy in Montmartre. The production is not exactly expensive-sounding, but how do we know they didn’t mean to make it sound this way? Especially since the storytelling and the quirky interplay between vocals is so well designed. Cowboy in Montmartre feels like digging into a box labelled “cool” with lyrics about angry, young American men and beautiful French women making this feel like a lost classic.