Dorks And Losers

Cum­ber­land, Maryland-based Cot­ton Jones (for­merly The Cot­ton Jones Bas­ket Ride) is the cur­rent pas­sion in Michael Nau’s life. For­merly a side project, Nau left his band Page France to pur­sue the two-piece ensem­ble Cot­ton Jones full-time.

“This feels like a new leaf for me. I’ve learned to let the music hap­pen, rather than try­ing to invent some­thing,” Nau explains. “I’m still sift­ing through some imag­i­nary the­sis, but it makes more sense now” (press release).

Part­nered with Page France band mate Whit­ney McGraw, Nau cre­ates a mel­low psy­che­delic folk-pop that’s almost indis­tin­guish­able from the more melodic indie pop of his PF days. A cross between Mazzy Starr and the col­lab­o­ra­tions of Mark Lane­gan and Iso­bel Camp­bell, Cot­ton Jones’ Para­noid Cocoon is the follow-up to the duo’s 2008 full-length debut The River Strum­ming.

With Cot­ton Jones, Nau eschews pomp and cir­cum­stance for seem­ingly one acoustic gui­tar, but the sounds appear fuller as his and McGraw’s vocals soar. McGraw’s twangy voice is com­mand­ing yet sym­pa­thetic, and fully com­ple­ments Nau’s low-key gruff, as in the rus­tic anthem “Up A Tree (Went This Heart I Have)” and the Andy Grif­fith Show–esque “By Morn­ing Light.”

The duo is unafraid to let the music sim­ply exist, never push­ing it and almost always act­ing as merely part of it. Much of “Some Strange Rain” is instru­men­tal, and only when the song matures do Nau and McGraw join in like two whis­per­ing winds caught near the day’s end. The vocal-less “Photo Sum­mer­lude” is no dif­fer­ent, placed as an appro­pri­ate mid­point to the start of another day.

The beauty of Para­noid Cocoon is that it cap­tures the laid-back nature of country/outdoor liv­ing. While coun­try folk might be too rich for some, CJ puts it down sev­eral notches to solely focus on the sedate ambiance, which is best laid bare in “Cot­ton & Velvet.”

If the music feels like a shared expe­ri­ence, it’s by unin­ten­tional design as Nau clar­i­fies, “I believe there’s a famil­iar mood from start to fin­ish… the lyrics work like visu­als of such moods.” Whether it’s a force­ful arti­fi­cial push in “Gotta Cheer Up” or a con­tin­ual reminder that you’re ordi­nary in “I Am The Changer,” some­times there’s solace in commonality.

[pho­tos via Quite Sci­en­tific Records]
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Track list:

1. Up A Tree (Went This Heart I Have)
2. Gotta Cheer Up
3. Some Strange Rain
4. Gone The Bells
5. Photo Sum­mer­lude
6. By Morn­ing Light
7. Cot­ton & Vel­vet
8. Lit­tle Ash­tray In The Sun
9. Blood Red Sen­ti­men­tal Blues
10. I Am The Changer

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