Cougar – Patriot – Album Review

As a general rule, I love instrumental post-rock records.  This year, I’ve been way into Oceans’ Nothing Collapses (which strayed a bit more towards  emotional release) and Tortoise’s Beacons of Ancestorship (which took a more clinical, precise approach.)  In a less temporally constrained sense, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is in my pantheon of great records.  To a large degree, I think I love these records (and others of their stripe) because they allow me freedom of thought while I’m listening to them.  I’m not pinned down by the lyrical content, which I have a tendency to over-focus on.  Take an atrocious example:  If I’m reading a book and Mrs. Citizen’s in the other room, listening to the stereo, I constantly get distracted by the words in the songs she’s listening to.  I can’t think about Murakami when “Fast Car” is playing.  It’s impossible for me to stay out of Tracy Chapman’s hacky narrative, probably because it’s loud and drowns out the sounds of text in my head.  Same goes for writing.  If I’m listening to somebody else’s words, I can’t hear my own.  As such, I need instrumental records to fill the sonic void when I perform any kind of mental work.  (This probably accounts for my fondness for jazz music as well.  Horace Silver gets your fingers moving when you type.)  All this to say that I’m not the most objective commentator on a record like Cougar’s Patriot (out September 15th on Counter Records).  When records like this one, a jumble of aggressive, slow building guitar parts melded to vaguely electronic beats, completely free of language, come across my desk, I’m going to cling to them.

Often, records like Patriot hinge on the building of tension and its ecstatic release, with songs that wend and wind their way to a bombastic explosion of sound.  While Cougar is certainly capable of playing the “introduce an idea, work the slow-build, then turn-everything to eleven” card (the three-minute mark of the “Endings” is a raw, loud peak in a killer track that fits this description perfectly), the record has an impressive range.  This isn’t a collection of songs that all do the same thing.  There’s a three song stretch in the middle of the record that displays this versatility.  “Pelourinho” works in a distinctly middle-eastern mode, opens with a guitar that sounds damn near like a harp and has an honest to god sitar solo (or a guitar solo  manipulated to sound like one) in the last half.  “Thundersnow” is, essentially, an arty speed metal track, with an armageddonish chord structure and wailing, shrieking guitars over the top.  It’s over in a blink, less than two minutes (more on that later), but it packs a serious punch.  Rounding out the trio is “Heavy Into Jeff” (which, I misread initially as “Heavy Intro Jeff,” which would have made a ton of sense).  It’s my favorite track on the record, probably for the evil keyboard riff that powers the song.  In contrast to “Thundersnow” however, this song draws a ton from electronic music, with odd breakdowns, electric blips and and acid-laced devolution of that initial keyboard riff.  Over the course of these three tracks, while clearly remaining a band with a unique sound and vision, Cougar splay across a ton of genres and explore a ton of ideas.  Sometimes these kinds of records can get a shade dry and repetitive; they have to have some sort of hook to work with any sort of lasting effect: the sheer musicianship of Tortoise, the heart on the shoulder angst of Oceans, the pummeling operatic nature of Explosions in the Sky are the things that keep me going back to those records.  Cougar’s hook is that they do a lot of things well without sounding like empty-headed mynahs.  Each of the songs on Patriot work for one reason or another and they all do it in a slightly (or greatly) different mode.

Another way to look at Patriot is from a slightly more removed, mathematical perspective.  There are eleven tracks on the record, but it only clocks in at just over 45 minutes.  Cougar are succinct.  Sometimes, the post-rock folks can get a little bit meandering.  To be fair, meandering is, more or less, right up my street, although I acknowledge that my fondness for musical verbosity might not be shared by the masses.  There are times when I wish Cougar would drop the hammer down a bit and stretch one of these songs (something like the vaguely anthemic “Appomattox”) into a twenty minute jam.  There’s room in these tracks to spread out, but Cougar restrain themselves a bit, hitting the ideas, moving them to a logical conclusion and then moving to the next track.  The part of me that loves Phish wants to think that Cougar spreads the tracks out a bit in a live context, but the part of me that loves Fugazi hopes that they don’t.  There’s something to be said for being to the point and, while this approach often makes me yearn for wider canvasses, that might kind of be the broader message.

If you dig instrumental post-rock, this album will be up your alley.  I know that there are folks out there who need words (our own Diamond Jim falls into that category; he passed this thing my way after nobody started singing) and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But, if you’re looking to tap into a broader emotional vein (or need something for the headphones while you’re doing a crossword), Patriot is going to make you smile.

Cougar – Stay Famous