Hand it to Tim Cohen: He's got his routine down. Perched high above the streets of San Francisco in the group-house tower that serves as his bedroom and recording studio, the Fresh & Onlys front-man whips off three-chord pop songs with the kind of habitude that normal people reserve for coffee drinking, prayer, and "Law & Order" re-runs. With every change in the weather a new set of songs arrives, each collection pressed to limited edition vinyl and packaged in his trademark scary-clown/blood-weeping-eagle artwork.
Except, not this time. The Glad Birth of Love breaks the steady solo-record routine that Cohen has established over the last several years. Rather than a smattering of scruffy psych-pop cast-offs, it's a record of long-form suites-- four songs in 45 minutes. The fuzz guitars are, mostly, absent. Another change: It's billed under the name of his live backing band, Magic Trick, rather than his own.
In the past, Cohen's solo material has been raw and off the cuff-- a steady stream of downcast sing-alongs jammed out straight to tape and passed on to the world with minimal afterthought. But The Glad Birth of Love is more intricately arranged, slipping from baroque picking to mystical oud-fueled zone-outs. Cohen handles most of the instruments, but there are plenty of guests, including Jonas Reinhardt's Diego Gonzalez (droney stuff), the Sandwiches' Grace Cooper (vocals), and Thee Oh Sees' Jon Dwyer, now the Bay Area's go-to session flautist.
Between the multi-movement song cycles and the oboe overdubs, there's more than a hint of prog to The Glad Birth of Love. But Cohen's ambition skews closer to Skip Spence than Rick Wakeman. Though they're ornately embellished, Cohen's epic ballads are basically just a bunch of his regular songs, only strung together stream-of-conciousness style. On "Clyde"-- a sort of surrealist father-and-son tale-- Cohen keeps the mood mellow, skipping through an endless series of finger style guitar figures, never looking back to a melody or motif once discarded. It peaks in the middle, with Clyde's sea-born demise, where Cohen-- who, despite his stoney demeanor, is strangely accomplished at channeling biblical wrath-- shouts, "God's great everlasting realm is forever," over a single thundering chord. At 13 minutes, album opener "Cherished One" is just one really, really, really long love song.
In both his solo work and his songs with the Fresh & Onlys, simplicity was key to Cohen's charm. He had a perfect grasp on just how many riffs it took to make a snack-size lo-fi garage rock song sound huge. Even in his solo work, there was always a chorus on the horizon. The Glad Birth of Love throws everything out on the table. It's a summation of Cohen's music-- his psych-rock output, but also the out-folk exercises of his old, unheralded band, Black Fiction. Sing-along moments are scarce, and sometimes the narrative gets foggy. But The Glad Birth of Love's scale gives Cohen room to stretch, letting his weirdo lyrical ambitions run wild amid a jumble of pastoral plucking.
