In terms of male bragging rights, the goal of a bar-hookup typically requires either an outright hottie (see Maxim, Poly Dolly) or if you are a hipster, it’s some sort of girl who’s hot mostly because of her brazen uniqueness (see Vice magazine, Williamsburg). The male ego tends to require one of these things for a morning-after bragging right/success, otherwise what are you really doing that the next guy couldn’t do? Of course, such incidents are actually few and far between and to the credit of most females, pursuing extremes doesn’t necessarily always provide some sort of fruitful long-lasting “love” or even necessarily a short-term good physical relationship/mild emotional connection.
To a large extent, the same can be said of the music blogger/reviewer. Little separates he or she from that totally immature bro/hipster who’s looking more for easy-to-define bragging rights than any sort of actual enjoyment. Why spend the time searching through the millions of bands to talk about when it is so much easier to talk about a band that’s brazenly easy to define and discuss. In this way, a band like Cotton Jones can easily miss the hype machine (see the music blog-aggregating Website HypeMachine) and never actually break as much as they should.
Cotton Jones is the new project from Michael Nau, the frontman for broken-up indie-pop band Page France. Their new album “Paranoid Cocoon,” hits the path of psychedelic folk pop that’s been plowed through by band after band lately. In hook-up terms, Michael Nau is your typical Urban Outfitter shopper pulling through the same sale racks as everybody else. During the runtime, he never does anything out rightly Starbucks-ready (see Fleet Foxes) nor does he blatantly try to fuck with everybody’s heads to get attention (see Black Lips).
No, Nau relaxes somewhere in between and in that way he’s really easy to ignore. He slams through some good vibes and places his touches in small and subtle ways. It’s the subtle touches though that make the album a keeper for the occasional listener. Nau’s totally indefinable spirituality always flirts beneath in a way that can consistently intrigue a certain brand of agnostic. His bells and keyboards fuzz with the same sort of optimism and comfort that was always infused in Page France.
Most importantly, his lyrics hover consistently between the sort of universal sentiments of the anthems that bands like Bon Iver create and the complete disregard for definability that seems to be a highlight of artists like Devendra Banhart. Every sort of almost overly-emotional moment like for example in “Photo Summerlude” when Nau talks about crying because he can’t remember when he last cried, is balanced by some sort of passing honestly like in “I Am the Changer” when he says he’s “always a stranger, and a liar.”
The album is pure gauzy psych pop like many things. However, it’s really hard to discuss what it makes it good. It’s not necessarily always original or groundbreaking, nor is it the sort of universal favorite. It’s power lies mainly in its unique honesty and in that way it is hard to talk about in a way that’s enticing without betraying what it is. It’d be kind of like playing up your last hook-up when you know most of what you’re saying is stretching the truth.