Google’s new logo apparently requires just 305 bytes of data to load compared to 14,000 for the old one—and you won’t find a person who gives less of a fuck about that than Hannah Lew. Last year, her label Crime on the Moon released San Francisco Is Doomed, a compilation of local acts—including Thee Oh Sees, Mikal Cronin, and Erase Errata—railing against the Google-led tech boom that’s pushed rents into the stratosphere and made America’s historic counter-cultural capital increasingly unaffordable for starving artists. Meanwhile, Lew used Cold Beat’s 2014 debut length, Over Me, to address the situation in more oblique terms, mining the feelings of dislocation and depression that result when your city no longer feels like home, and everything that once made it special has given way to consumerism and conformity. A glance at the imposing, sterile glass skyscraper on the cover of Cold Beat’s sophomore release, Into the Air, would indicate Lew is still waging war on search-engine ostracization. But, at the same time, the parting clouds above it suggest she’s starting to appreciate the silver linings of her situation.
Like Over Me, Into the Air thrives on the oppositional tension between frigidity and motion inherent to the Cold Beat name, through a yin-yang balance of winsome '60s girl-group melodies and icy '80s post-punk. But the synth and drum-machine experiments sprinkled among Over Me’s guitar-battered rave-ups have been given much more room to flourish here. It’s to the point where Cold Beat effectively resemble two discrete bands: an endearingly scrappy garage-rock act and a mechanistic, melancholic electro-pop outfit. However, Into the Air’s savvy sequencing plots a gradual journey between these two poles, lending this seemingly compact 10-song, 31-minute album a more epic sense of scale. Into the Air is frontloaded with the most exuberant pop songs Lew has written to date—in particular, the gleaming jangle-punk jewel "Broken Lines", which barrels forth like a joyous, C86-ed take on Blondie’s "Dreaming". But by letting in more sun, Cold Beat also produce deeper shadows—after whipping through two breezy verses on "Bruno", the song’s propulsive bassline leads us into an exhilarating, stomach-turning descent that makes you feel like you’re rolling down Powell Street on a cable car with broken brake lines.
Tellingly, the flow of Into the Air mirrors the very process of gentrification that’s weighed so heavily on Lew’s mind, transforming the opening tracks’ raw and restless energy into a more orderly and austere second act. "Cracks" is the album’s key transitional track, pitting Lew’s beautifully sighed chorus and circular-saw guitar noise against synth oscillations and a motorik rhythm track to usher us into the album’s electro-oriented back half. But as her sonic environs turn more chilly, Lew cranks up the heat: she delivers Into the Air’s most captivating performance on the Chromatics-tinted nocturnalia of "Spirals", while on "Ashes"—which evokes a classic David Bowie song in both name and ping-ponged synth squiggle—she renders post-apocalyptic scenes of fiery, floating detritus with an elated, operatic coo, as if gazing wondrously into a snow globe filled with black flakes. The San Francisco she once knew may indeed be doomed, but Lew will be ready to rebuild it from the rubble when the bubble inevitably bursts.
