Tim Cohen is something like the West Coast Robert Pollard. Cohen’s songwriting is earthier and darker than the work of the Guided by Voices frontman, but it is a useful comparison: Both are hugely prolific, fiercely independent rock ’n’ roll lifers—bedroom auteurs with a taste for tape hiss and eccentric pop songs. If you know Cohen at all, you likely know him as the frontman for the Fresh & Onlys—a band that, along with Thee Oh Sees, Sonny and the Sunsets, Ty Segall, and others, defined the San Francisco garage-psych explosion of a few years back. But, as is true with Pollard and GBV, Cohen’s main project can’t keep up with his bounding creative urges, so he funnels his songwriting into side bands, notably Magic Trick, which has released around four records in the last five years, and his solo work.
Luck Man is Cohen’s fourth LP under his own name (if you count 2011’s Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick), and the most polished and most mature of the bunch. But compared to the wide-angle jangle pop of the last two Fresh & Onlys records—2014’s House of Spirits and 2012’s excellent Long Slow Dance—Luck Man is a decidedly bare-bones affair. Cohen is at his most modest and self-effacing here, building quiet, quirky songs out of acoustic guitars, soft percussion, and accents of piano and synth. The touchstones are early Belle and Sebastian (minus the preciousness), early Van Morrison, Smog, and the self-titled Velvet Underground record.
Musically, Luck Man has its moments—the stark fingerpicking on “Bedfellows,” the harmonies (courtesy of Magic Trick’s Noelle Cahill) on the chorus of “John Hughes,” the bittersweet piano riff that slowly closes out the record. But ultimately the music is little more than a delivery system for Cohen’s words and ideas—as is his flat, affectless baritone. It’s Cohen’s distinct blend of whimsy, black humor, and wisdom—and his refusal to take himself too seriously—that make the record work. (Cass McCombs, it should be noted, uses similar tools to equally great affect.)
Cohen is an expert at pairing genuine longing with absurdist humor, such that you can’t entirely tell the difference between the two. “I Need a Wife” is a gorgeous little ballad about love’s uncertainties—before it explodes with Cohen’s manic recitations of the song’s title: “Now I need a wife! I need a wife! I need a wife!” Does the guy actually need a wife? No idea. Does he like the way the jarring echo effect on his vocals makes his words spiral out into infinity? Most definitely.
Cohen is obsessed with death, its inevitability and consistency; he knows the dirt will cover us all. But he delivers that message with levity and wit—he doesn’t want to scare us away. “Breathe and die, is all you have to do,” he reminds us on the jaunty “Breathe and Die,” hoping that we’ll take solace in such straightforward tasks. The record is suffused with the surreal and otherworldly (“I dream in melody,” Cohen told an interviewer last year). On “Wall About a Window,” Cohen hopes to escape to the “bridge of limbs” and the “forest of palms”; On “Sunshine,” he’s “throwing airplanes at the moon” against a “velvet-covered night.” Cohen suggests that a wild imagination is one of our best defenses against mortality and the ravages of time. (Pollard, age 59, would surely agree.)
Darkness and anxiety threaten to overwhelm Cohen throughout. On “Meat Is Murder” he describes waking up in the middle of the night crying, his hands covered in blood. But in the end, Luck Man shows us how we can survive life’s countless indignities by reminding ourselves of its many small (and not so small) pleasures: a cloudless sky, a lazy morning, a long walk with a good friend. And the way “love can free the laughter from within [our] lungs.”
