Cola’s debut album, “Deep in View,” is among the best released this year. One of the most impressive things to me about this album is that it’s full of songs like “Blank Curtain,” which the band released in advance of the album late last fall. “Blank Curtain” sounds so simple and utilitarian in some ways, but the components of the song—Darcy’s detached vocals and mechanical guitar, Stidworthy’s bass and Cartwright’s calm and authoritative beats—combine into something incredibly compelling, a song that whirrs and collapses and moves so vividly.
“Water Table” might be my favorite song on the album. The beat is that dead, precise beat that you hear in some Joy Division and New Order songs, a flat pulse, accompanied by occasional bass and quick brush strokes of guitar. Darcy starts the song by singing, “Desalinate the sea/and pour the waters into me,” in a defeated, resigned voice. And, later, “I think I’m doing all right/I don’t need additional lives,” and “Last long enough to go extinct/just long enough to overthink.” There’s a tone running throughout the album, here and there in Darcy’s lyrics, of being exhausted by the shittiness of the state of the world, the endless immiseration, our inability to stop wreaking havoc on each other and the natural world. “Landers,” the beautiful final song on the album, expresses this sentiment especially well, with Darcy singing over slow piano about a feeling of grief overtaking him while standing on the edge of a “dirty highway.”
“Fulton Park,” another favorite from the album, is a more revved-up, lurching tune. Darcy’s vocals are a little more lively on this one (though nowhere on the album does he approach the foregrounded verve that he sang with in Ought) and the band switches between a bouncy groove and a fall-apart shuffle. The song finishes on a big bass rumble, with Darcy singing, “For a moment, then/wash it down/wash it down.” Darcy has remarked that “Fulton Park,” like “Landers,” takes a look at the world and the “odd, magical, sometimes empty things that humans do on that landscape.”
“Deep in View” is, from top to bottom, an album that holds your attention—it’s a post-punk album, it’s a guitar album, but it’s also the kind of album that scratches an itch you didn’t even know you had.