The Brighton-based Cold Pumas didn't play their first live shows until a year after they formed in Exeter in 2008, and between then and now, they've released just three of their own singles in addition to two splits-- one with Male Bonding, the other with Women, Fair Ohs, and Friendo-- and toured to a moderate degree. It's not that they're unambitious: Over those four years, frontman Dan Reeves and brothers Oliver and Patrick Fisher have worked on mastering and refining the seam of fluid but bristling, colorless post-punk they share with Women, which manifests on their debut album, Persistent Malaise. But while perfecting the kind of jam that could bowl along forever with scree and smoke in its wake, things outside the band inevitably fell apart.
In an interview with the band Sauna Youth, Patrick confessed that "the lyrical directness of our album unfortunately follows the thematic focus of Bon Iver's debut (minus the cabin)." Fisher's intense heartbreak called for more thorough lyrical treatment than the shallow vagaries he had lent to their past work. On Persistent Malaise, his lines are meticulously structured, excavating old times so that he might torture himself by staring clean at them. "Our past seems angled to support what has bloomed/ But pillow talk, it should not be exhumed/ For what I whispered, I would never recoup/ I'm not so bitter, just a crystalline loop," he yelps on "Fog Cutter", over a thick, smoggy riff that's perpetually climbing peaks, sounding at its best like a Cryptograms offcut.
The album toes the line between tension and ambience, exploring the strain inherent in stasis. The siren-like guitar interplay of "Sherry Island" is overshot with a near-euphoric wave of warm drone, while Fisher's lyrics chronicle a Halloween party where the guests' obfuscating masks only serve to make him realize how distant he was from them in the first place. "Variety Lights" is the album's only instrumental, ticking between dank and trebly like two hypnotic shades of an animated .gif. On "This Modernist Crown", Fisher is subject to several layers of emotional and physical paralysis-- "I wake up tired for still I'm dreaming of you"-- as a warped, queasy cloud of feedback gives way to the record's only guitar solo, and a rare bout of smashing, all-out aggression.
While emotional inertia forms the backbone of Persistent Malaise, Cold Pumas' debut is also a testament to honing one's craft before presenting it to the world. Its sureness and subtlety say more than a few gauche early pullquotes, and although Cold Pumas undoubtedly won't sound the same forever, their commitment to consistency has already served them admirably.
