★★★★☆
Taking a step away from her work as frontwoman for The Furrs, Gabriella Cohen has delivered her first solo record,Full Closure And No Details, an album with the same sweetness and thorns of a black rose.
Cohen crafts a dark slacker grunge-pop sound, her work feeling like the natural offspring of Courtney Barnett, The Velvet Underground, and The Cure. Opening song ‘Beaches’ contains the cruel stupor of romance, as though Cohen is inviting you to go skipping down the beach, kicking over kids’ sandcastles and laughing all the way, while ‘I Don’t Feel So Alive’ is a seductive invitation to give up, grow a beard and/or beer belly, sit on the porch and just watch life go by. Tracks like ‘Piano Song’ and ‘Sever The Walls’ see Cohen’s voice drenched in the echoes of some empty bar, full of a bleak darkness that wouldn’t seem out of place on the soundtrack for True Detective.
There’s a character to Cohen’s voice that is both charming and whinging, and it’s difficult to ever work out whether it’s enjoyable or irritating, but the riffs and melodies soothe and coax you into the affirmative.
When you need to flip life a big “Fuck you!”, this is the album for the job. It’s dark, it’s rebellious, it’s intoxicating, and it’s a beautiful debut.
Gabriella Cohen’sFull Closure And No Detailsis released independently on Bandcamp.
