Cold Gawd
I’ll Drown On This Earth
Dais Records
Think of the deep, resonant scream into the void that awakens I’ll Drown On This Earth not as a hostile warning to stay out. Rather, consider it a welcoming entry to a celestial shoegaze tunnel of love, its gaping maw beckoning adventurers to experience cavernous expanses, slow-motion demolitions, and multihued clouds of blown-out blurs and whirs. Matthew Wainwright needed to first empty some overstuffed emotional baggage and throw out the contents.
The rest of Cold Gawd’s crew are the singer and main songwriter’s co-pilots on their sublime sophomore voyage, the Southern Californians hitting heavy, Deftones-like turbulence in the alluring epic “Gorgeous” and the seductively lazy crunch of a sprawling “Portland.” After launching into an enveloping whirlwind of rushing, My Bloody Valentine-inspired noise and melodic flutter on the curiously titled “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name,” they lay siege to the senses in the immersive, unhurried “Duchamp is My Lawyer,” with its immense, gloom-and-doom riffs and layers of textured guitars. Any court in the land would rule for Cold Gawd’s reverence for classic shoegaze sounds, no matter how familiar they are.
What matters most, though, is Cold Gawd’s mission-critical advancement of the genre, the slightly warped beauty of “Nudism” — clean and airy, taking delicate piano steps — icing over Washed Out’s modern, chillwave breath. Vaguely lovelorn and entirely hypnogogic, I’ll Drown On This Earth deftly downshifts into contemporary dream-pop drift about midway through. Even as they swoon like Slowdive across a shimmering “Tappan,” they revel in Beach House’s fading reveries, lightly brushed vocals whispering laments like ghosts in listeners’ ears.
They get that signature mix of distorted power and prismatic light down pat in the beautifully corrosive closer “Bird in Space,” its sheer, frozen mass breaking off an ice shelf and leisurely falling into murky, effects-laden waters. I’ll Drown On This Earth is pure languid bliss, full of longing and ready to escape into bittersweet nostalgia at a moment’s notice. These are not walls of sound. They are giant, painted, mutating canvasses passing by, and yet, while there’s enough space for Cold Gawd to stretch out, they know their limits. Pray for more of the same.
