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Jun 14, 2024Cola’s music is precise, it’s smart, it’s singular. The Gloss is an exceptional record, perfect for cool nights in darkened rooms at the ocean’s edge.
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Jun 14, 2024‘The Gloss’ might not hold a candle to the Television-esque majesty of ‘Sun Coming Down’ - an era firmly in their rearview mirror - but it shows that, together, Darcy’s wit, Stidworthy’s precision, and Cartwright’s skeletal rhythms create something special. It’s not quite a reinvention, but they’re still seeking new horizons.
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Jun 14, 2024The guitars on The Glass can be cutting and harsh, but they’re often kind of pretty and even a little bit rousing. The rhythms are sharp and skeletal, but also propulsive and jumpy.
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Jun 14, 2024An album where the energy is intrinsic and impossible to miss, but deeper complexities hide in the details that keep changing.
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Jun 21, 2024If Darcy’s lyrics require putting in some work to decode them, the band makes musical immersion easy by consistently striking the familiar balance of dissonant sound, disjointed melody, and bone-dry production that defined indie rock’s late-’80s/early-’90s golden age, before synths, string sections, and festival-baiting choruses became de rigueur.
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Jun 25, 2024When they let loose, like on the more intricate Bell Wheel, Darcy reminds us why he's such a compelling vocalist when he shows a more playful side. While they have their songwriting down to a science, Cola could elevate their craft with a little more disruption.
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Jun 14, 2024There is a mix of winsome romanticism and righteous anger throughout the album, but it’s occasionally difficult to see which are tongue-in-cheek or genuine.
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Jun 14, 2024The Gloss is full of pretty moments and good one-liners, but the record lacks any key sense of memorability.
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Jun 14, 2024Although the band clearly wears its assorted influences proudly on their collective sleeve, this diverse approach can sometimes hinder progress, resulting in some songs that are vibrant, complex and uniquely Cola, while relegating others to the derivative badlands.