Spectreview: Cola – Deep In View

Released: May 20, 2022

Rock
(Post-Punk)

-DEEP PINK-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

“Have you been to the movies lately?
Did you read the marquee?
It’s not even started and there is a push to leave”

Some people turn to post-punk for a message; others like their music delivered at angles, like rain hitting sideways. Deep In View has both of these elements, but it’s primarily a triumph of production. The songwriting is clean, the playing is tight, and thanks to a stellar recording/mixing effort every sound bounds out of the speakers. Evan Cartwright’s toms hit just right on “Met Resistance,” Ben Stidworthy’s bass bounces off the bottom of the stomach walls on “So Excited,” and Tim Darcy’s strums fall like cascading water on “Degree.” The sound is so sumptuous that it elevates what have become standard post-punk arrangements, the kind people like Darcy and Stidworthy used to standardize in Ought.

Together, the trio craft music of simple parts and immediate pleasures, an iceberg hiding a tangled commentary on post-capitalism. Darcy speaks in disjointed poetry, and parsing his stanzas is not necessary to enjoy the record, but doing so reveals a temporal thread connecting the record to, say, the shift between art exhibit and art gallery; hyper pieces of faux profundity charging exorbitant prices, vacuums in glass boxes, Kruger against Koons. The band’s title is an acronym for “cost of living adjustment,” while the name itself captures a product so familiar to billions yet so frustratingly indescribable it forms its own logic. When Darcy states “I am that technology now,” it’s hard not to hear it escape your headphones – its source the phone in your pocket or the laptop on your desk – and have it not resonate.

Though the band plays with the deftness of lifers, there’s a bluntness to Darcy’s poetry that rubs a little against it. He dances around the point, but does so in a way that feels like he’s talking more often about nothing than something. He conjures vivid images (“Desalinate the sea/Pour the waters into me”) but the connective tissue between his images and the purported topics he wishes to convey doesn’t feel so strong. Deep In View works best when his words become just syllables sliding against you, propping up the band’s dense playing. From that angle, it’s as confident a debut as anything I’ve heard this year.

Recommended for commercials.