On the second song of Elvis Depressedly's latest LP, singer-songwriter Mat Cothran lays out a guiding principle: "no more sad songs." For those who've followed his recordings over the past half-decade, this could come as something of a surprise. Both under the Depressedly banner, which also includes multi-instrumentalist Delaney Mills as a permanent member, and his solo project Coma Cinema, Cothran has built an expansive discography that leans heavily toward the downcast. But this time around, Cothran hints early on that things are going to be different and they largely are. For New Alhambra, his seventh and latest release as Elvis Depressedly, he's crafted a utopian sort of indie-pop, an ecstatic evocation of the second coming, professional wrestling, and radical positivity.
It's been a long journey to this point for the South Carolina-born Cothran. As a fiercely independent home-recording apologist, his efforts have always been aided—or hamstrung—by whatever half-broken equipment he could get his hands on the moment the songs started pouring out. In leaner times, this often meant that his releases were unapologetically lo-fi, a quirk of his work that cut both ways. When outlining quiet despair, the grit and grime functions as a poignant mirror for his work, but on more buoyant numbers the nuances—the comedy and uplift that he often seeks to convey—could get lost in the muddle. So to hear him proclaim, less than five minutes into his newest record, that those gloomier moments had been excised could have been cause for concern.
But with the exception of Coma Cinema's 2013 Posthumous Release, recorded in Los Angeles with production help from local band TV Girl, New Alhambra is his most traditionally well-produced record. Cothran's guitars roil and collapse with a multi-dimensional shimmer and Mills' keyboard parts are given body and voice that would've been impossible on the crackly Elvis Depressedly recordings of the past. With such a solid production backline, Cothran's given room to experiment more than he ever has before. He coats vocals in idiosyncratic, nauseous chorus effects ("Ease"), scatters pitch shifted vocals throughout, and even manages to squeeze in a reversed guitar solo for good measure ("New Heaven, New Earth"). Cothran and Mills achieve a textural depth that's rare for songwriters in this lane. There's far more corners to explore than on, say, a Jackson Scott record, but they also manage not to overcomplicate things and ruin the unique magic of the brittle aesthetic.
It's hard to imagine a more perfect vehicle for Cothran's wholehearted embrace of optimism. He explicitly invokes the Bible on a number of occasions throughout the record, but when he does so it's only to underline themes of rebirth. He proves that he can write with delicacy about joy and love and light just as easily as he can about Satan and burning churches. On "N.M.S.S.", he proclaims that he "love[s] everyone that [he has] ever known" and he "go[es] to sleep still believing" in an abstract "someday" that might come for him. It's a plain little sentiment, but it works with what's around it. Watery guitars and plodding kick drums open up and buoy his open-hearted vocal. He's happy, if only intermittently. And unlike Pharrell's catchy, dead-eyed assertion of the same, Cothran's musical encapsulation of the feeling is even-keeled and aqueous—true to the hesitant hopefulness that can follow in the wake of overwhelming depression.
But maybe that's the fleeting feeling Cothran has been trying to get at all along. He's said that those who weep while listening to his songs are doing the equivalent of "crying [while] watching 'Looney Tunes' or something." That sells short the fragile honesty of his work, but it speaks to the triumph of New Alhambra's overall enterprise, that such an assertion finally makes sense. For the first time, we can laugh right along with him.
