C.O.L.A. is sort of a self-titled album. It’s an acronym for Cost of Living Adjustment, a fitting conceptual framework for the band’s third record. Why? Because C.O.L.A. considers, among other things, socialism vs. hell. It considers: rolling the dice of life. The eerie and sweet pangs that nostalgia can provoke. This is not new territory for band members Tim Darcy, Evan Cartwright, and Ben Stidworthy. It is, in Cartwright’s words “a deepening of what we’ve been doing.” C.O.L.A. is an intricate, beautiful, and sometimes strange record. It is the band’s most refined offering. A perfection of carefully honed aesthetic impulses.
Cola, as a band, says Darcy is defined by its “tasteful minimalism.” A deep appreciation for making music that is romantic, subtle, and deceptively intense. C.O.L.A., however, is the band’s most maximalist work to date. This is a little tongue and cheek (“We were so worried,” says Cartwright, “About all the songs on this record being too different”). In practice, this maximalism means that a song like “Hedgesitting,” has both live drums and a sample drum loop. “Hedgesitting,” is a gorgeous, lush song. It’s like a deconstructed, chopped & screwed b-side from the Cure’s Disintegration. It’s also a little indebted to Sarah Records. “When you were young,” Darcy sings at the song’s start, “you came to make it.”
C.O.L.A., like everything written by the band, is inherently collaborative. The band writes everything separately, then comes together and works in the studio. Look again to “Hedgesetting,” to see this in action, which started out with chords that Darcy had sent, then the band expanded it together, with Stidworthy remixing it right before heading to the studio. This division of labor works intuitively. It is a part of the band’s DNA to say, take an arrangement Stidworthy wrote, and then have Darcy and Cartwright build upon it. Take “Favoured Over the Ride,” as an example. “I wanted to create a dusky, melancholy palette for Tim to write lyrics for,” says Stidworthy. The song starts with a lonely, dreamy guitar riff. Then there’s a crisp line of bass and it all comes into focus: “What’s on the ceiling that’s caught your gaze?” sings Darcy. It’s a moment of clarity on a record that is interested abstraction. C.O.L.A. is full of these clarifying moments: where a whole swirl of feelings become so clear that it almost hurts a little bit.
One of the goals with C.O.L.A. was to have the melody guide the lyrics. This is a distinct shift from the sprechgesang that has been an anchor for many of Darcy’s earlier records. Here, the vocal melodies are on the same level as all of the other melodies on the record. But the lyrics are no less poetic, no less precise than anything Darcy has written before (“It’s not,” he jokes, “like we’re making a Cocteau Twins song.”) The result is a record that is ruthlessly aware of all of its parts, and treats them all as equally important. C.O.L.A. is a record that speaks to itself: where all of its parts are in direct conversation with each other. Sounds do not blur, even when they are expansive. It is abstract, oblique, sometimes strange, whatever you want to call it. But it is also beautiful, in the classic sense. Beautiful like a painting can be beautiful. Really, really gorgeous. Almost chiseled in the way it plays so deliberately with experimentation. On “Skywriter’s Sigh,” for example, things sizzle and flicker. It touches on the sublime. It is Cola, the band, at their very best.
