Harry Cloud - Red Barn

LA's Harry Cloud is at it again.  His Cry Now, Cry Later EP with Cops was one of the highlights of 2013 - if you like music that slides muddily around your brain, soaking up here and picking up bits of mental debris there until what you end up with is a massive pile of amazing stuff that's half them and half your own fragmented, blasted preconceptions - which I do.  

Now he's back, with another NYOP release on his bandcamp site and, if anything, it's an even more volatile and arresting collection, spanning as it does a bewilderingly broad spectrum all the way from woozy introspection right the way through to manic bursts of  energy.  Exactly what you'd expect from Harry Cloud, only moreso.

My favourite of the six tracks on Red Barn is the longest, 'WOrmhole', mainly because it seems to cover every inch of that spectrum and somehow make room for several more besides.  You can hear it in my February show on Dandelion Radio.  Because it's Harry Cloud, I can't leave it there though, so I've got the arresting melancholy ache of opener 'Dermatillomania' coming up in my March show, which starts streaming on Saturday.

Harry Cloud is necessary because, should I forget, he reminds me that the world is a crazy, warped and utterly irrational place and that I should like it for being just that.  Red Barn may be their most crazy, warped and irrational record yet and I find myself utterly devoted to it.

COPS - Cry Now, Cry Later

For those not familiar with COPS, I expect ears to prick up considerably when I mention it's a new project from Harry Cloud, whose Indian Pussy album so delighted me last year and which I probably even under-valued until I found myself getting stuck into it repeatedly towards the end of 2013.

For this project, Harry's teamed up with Chloe Mandel and Paul Roessler and together they've put out this three-track EP, which you can get as name-your-price at their bandcamp site here.  Unless you're one of those sadly inadequate individuals who found Harry's album last year - and, indeed, Ocean Song, which I rather clumsily overlooked the release of earlier in the year - a tad on the brutal side, you're going to love this project, which loses none of what made Indian Pussy such a triumphantly violent ride through the sensibilities of humanity and adds some sublime touches into the bargain.

Cry Now, Cry Later doesn't ask for much - less than twelve minutes of your time, in fact - and gives a hell of a lot back.  Opener 'Tiny Little Hole' might even charm you, its slowly evolving riff growing behind voices from the primordial soup of some semi-apocalyptic soundscape, before 'Somebody Shitty Hitting On Me' lays a breathy female vocal across undulating guitars.  I've chosen this track to play in my September show on Dandelion Radio, which you can hear streaming at various times through the month, although I might easily have gone for 'Deserve To Suffer', the EP's final track, which takes what I assume is Chloe's voice over a buzzing riff and meanders through the enigmatic corridors of sound that are plastered all over this fine release.

COPS have a pugilistic appeal that's served slowly, via sludgy masses of ground-out noise, but is no less powerful for it.  Indeed, their oozing packs a far more lasting wallop than so many of the visceral speed-merchants I stumble across on my daily search for something to tickle my increasingly warped fancies.  Allow me to save you much unfruitful browsing - go straight to COPS.

Download the EP here.