In the year 2008, I wore out the CD Dig That Treasure by Cryptacize, the theatrical jazz pop album by Chris Cohen and Nedelle Torrisi, which featured the cheeky video “Cosmic Sing-a-Long,” with its stop animation footage of a cowbell. The two artists drew out the best in each other, whether it was their elementary school playground meets cosmopolitan art gallery complimentary voices or the art-rock guitars that adorn each track. Ever since, his smooth, clear voice has been a sort of homecoming for me, along with his uniquely jazzy compositions.

An introvert who found an outlet in music from a very young age, and a practicer of transcendental meditation, Chris Cohen on the Cryptacize debut album, had all the workings of a musician with ambitions to create a better world. Cohen’s latest record, Paint A Room, his fourth solo record and first with label Hardly Art, has the same dynamic compositional DNA, but it’s grown up, and deals with some of the same universal questions with a maturer sound and poetry.

Whether it’s the opening track, “Damage,” which deals with state violence and the “subtly pervasive habit of denying someone else’s personhood,” (“Protect your property / but only life is precious”) or the title track, with its clever look at the similarities between domestic work and love (“Though we keep in touch / paint dries on the brush,”) Cohen is digging deeper on every track to try to find language and sound for the complicated experience of being a human in a messy, post-modern world.

“Randy’s Chimes,” this go around, has taken the place of the “Cosmic Sing-a-Long,” and everything is much more steeped in the personal touch and attention to detail. An artist who historically builds his albums on his own, from the bottom up, this record was a much more collaborative effort as well, recorded only after touring the songs together as a band. Whether it’s the jangle pop of “Night or Day” or the jazzy dissonance of “Laughing,” Cohen and team cover a lot of ground in terms of sound on the record.

A guitarist with indie rock outliers, Deerhoof, for a few years, working as a producer with the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, and Cass McCombs, he is a staple of the American indie rock scene. And this album is a hearty addition, which satisfies with either a surface listen or a deep dive. Its sophisticated jazz voicings, its piercing personal and social commentary, it is an album that demands replays. As he sings on the bopping “Physical Address” towards the end of the album, “Please explain it in your own words.” Chris Cohen has made an album only he could make, and we’re all the luckier for it.

Order Paint A Room by Chris Cohen HERE