Chris Cohen Brighton

Chris Cohen live in Brighton at Green Door Store on 1st August! Get tickets above, or from SeeTickets.

Chris Cohen was always a quiet kid. In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddler—to communicate without speaking to identify with others without the direct representation of words. It has worked, too, with Cohen’s terrific stint in the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art-rock act The Curtains, preceding production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. Somewhere along that long way, Cohen started writing lyrics. He found that, though it didn’t come naturally, the process offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way to see himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three twilit albums of casually complicated pop during the last decade radiated these epiphanies: handling family strife, navigating advancing age, and understanding social woes.

But Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on Paint a Room, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. There is the endless miasma of state violence on the subversively melodious opener “Damage,” the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-traced jangle “Laughing”: this is Cohen communicating with friends not only through his deep understanding of groove, harmony, and hook but also with his listeners through songs that croon of our uneasy little era.

Cohen even called in a few friends to help, with Jeff Parker contributing the fluttering horn arrangement on “Damage,” and Parker collaborator Josh Johnson (who produced Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-Award-winning album The Omnichord Real Book) supplying flute, sax, and clarinet arrangements throughout the record. It felt a little bit like producing someone else’s records, with Cohen given the chance to step back and evaluate others’ contributions to his own songs rather than scrutinize every little bit he made himself. This was a longtime ambition realized, another way of relating to others openly through sound.

Cohen, really, has never sounded so assured on a solo album, gliding above or sinking into this band that boasts a preternatural sense of feel. On “Damage,” as he surveys the way we lord power over people with less of it in most every walk of life, his voice lifts above Johnson’s horns like he’s looking for a way out. Cohen wrote “Sunever” for a transgender child in his life, while considering the violence that hard-and-fast categories can create. This song reminds us that we are “always in between,” that transitions are just a part of life. With the hook, he sweetly sings his vow: “You’re gonna find a way.” Cohen is tender and vulnerable in the lead, his voice cracking with feeling as the tune presses forward toward a better future. Written by cutting and pasting phrases from the unemployment form he filled out at the pandemic’s start, the frolicking “Physical Address” considers what it is we all want for our lives, how we untether ourselves from the past in the present. On Paint a Room, Cohen’s music feels like a warm spring breeze, easy to love and gentle to feel. But it’s often carrying something heavy, as if blowing in from some unseen storm cloud.

https://chriscohen.bandcamp.com

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Upcoming Love Thy Neighbour shows:
12032025 – Helen Ganya. Alphabet
12032025 – Pom Poko. Chalk
20032025 – The Wave Pictures. Lewes Constitutional Club
21032025 – Pure Adult + Cassels. Daltons
22032025 – Thank + Kal Marks. The Hope & Ruin
25032025 – Real Farmer. Hope & Ruin
29032025 –The Tubs. The Hope & Ruin
03042025 – Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. Chalk
05042025 – Jools. The Hope & Ruin
08042025 – Divorce. Chalk
09042025 – Ronker. The Hope & Ruin
09042025 – Fever Rouge. Alphabet
09042025 – Goblin Band. Lewes Constitutional Club
18042025 – Welly. The Charles Dickens, Worthing
20042025 – Chat Pile. Chalk
27042025 – Erotic Secrets of Pompeii. The Prince Albert
30042025 – Michael Cera Palin. Patterns
30042025 – Hannah James & Toby Kuhn. Lewes Constitutional Club
30042025 – GNOD & White Hills. Green Door Store.
02052025 – Henge. Concorde 2
02052025 – Penelope Trappes. Alphabet
04052025 – Acid Mothers Temple. The Hope & Ruin
06052025 – Soccer Mommy. Chalk
08052025 – Mekons. Lewes Constitutional Club
11052025 – Rust For Glory play Neil Young. Lewes Constitutional Club
11052025 – Miki Berenyi Trio. Dust
13052025 – Snapped Ankles. The Old Market
16052025 – The Bevis Frond. Lewes Constitutional Club|
22052025 – Lunar Vacation. The Hope & Ruin
23052025 – Atticomatic. Dust
29052025 – Shotgun Jimmie. Folklore Rooms
29052025 – Throwing Muses. Chalk
30052025 – MJ Lenderman. Chalk
31052025 – Oi Va Voi. Patterns
01062025 – Shonen Knife. Concorde 2
06062025 – Willi Carlisle. Alphabet
13062025 – Niamh Regan. Folklore
08072025 – Battlesnake + DZ Deathrays. Chalk
11072025 – Cheekface + Martha. Chalk
01082025 – Chris Cohen. Green Door Store
19092025 – Nic Cage Against The Machine. Patterns
20092025 – Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan. Dust
29102025 – Mumble Tide. The Prince Albert
13112025 – The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Concorde 2

Accessibility: Fully accessible, on one floor. Disabled toilet, ask at bar for key. Full gender neutral toilets. Warning, cobbled floors which are uneven in places. If you require a carer ticket, please contact us at info@lovethyneighbourmusic.co.uk with evidence such as a blue badge or access card. If strobe lighting or standing for long periods of time is an issue, please contact us in advance so we can make arrangements.

Chris Cohen Brighton

Chris Cohen Brighton