Sampling — Cotton Jones

COTTON JONES
PARANOID COCOON
Suicide Squeeze, 2009

By Nick McGregor

Music at its finest often evokes a sense of nostalgia that can bring sentimental listeners to the point of tears. Whether you like hard rock, acoustic folk or hip-hop, we all have songs or artists that, when listened to in the right frame of mind, cull up memories of summers past, relationships gone, or travels cherished. The debut album from Cotton Jones, a duo of Maryland residents who formerly played in Page France, slides into town swathed in that sort of dusty wistfulness.

Combining gently picked acoustic guitars, fragile drumbeats, and chugging organs, Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw also layer on reverb-heavy vocals to create an instantly enjoyable slice of Americana that could have easily emerged from any decade since the 1960s.

Paranoid Cocoon opens with the loping bass line of “Up A Tree (Went This Heart I Have),” a haunting little nugget of psychedelia that calls to mind equal parts Brian Jonestown Massacre, Jim Morrison, and Wilco. Twinkling organs then segue into “Gotta Cheer Up,” which finds Nau’s baritone crooning enveloped to idyllic effect by the languorous backing female vocals of McGraw. “Some Strange Rain” features lovely fingerpicking and a touch of luxurious Beach Boys slide guitar; “Gone The Bells” has a country feeling and mournful lyrics; and “By Morning Light” boasts absorbing whistles and splendid, almost cinematic strings.

“Little Ashtray In The Sun” picks up the pace of Paranoid Cocoon with a bit of Grateful Dead-ish jam-rock, and “Blood Red Sentimental Blues” highlights the strumming jauntiness of modern folk-rock, along with revealing matter-of-fact confessions like “I just thought I’d tell you/All the demons have been slayed.”

And while Cotton Jones’ lyrics don’t quite reach the height of poetic masterpiece, the repetition of heartbreaking lines like “I was looking for your heart/Through the flowers in the park” fit the melancholy ethos of Paranoid Cocoon. The fuzzy, minor key stagger of “Cotton & Velvet” takes three minutes to build from a lethargic start, but by song’s end, its plaintive swaying epitomizes the Cotton Jones experience: tenderly psychedelic, buoyantly desolate, and acutely unshakable.

Paranoid Cocoon won’t win any awards for bombast or complexity, but it will seep into your brain and provide the perfect soundtrack to some good ol’ reminiscing. Cue the well-crafted 41-minute Paranoid Cocoon up during a late-afternoon solo drive and you’ll find yourself consumed with introspective nostalgia in no time.