Another Cold Summer
Everything is Gone Now
self-released
Existing in parallel to the last several decades of melodic post-punk, there’s been a gritty, industrialized strain of the genre that feels more descended from the ugliness of Big Black than it does the pop-friendly sounds of New Order or the like. While never quite as popular a stylistic offshoot, records by The Soft Moon, Odonis Odonis and their ilk have found a lot of power in the dark, mechanized version of the sound, and it’s that tradition that France’s Another Cold Summer inhabits on the compellingly unpleasant Everything Is Gone Now.
The sound ANC plies is rough and ready by nature; as noted on the Bandcamp liners, the record was recorded with a guitar, a few cheap synths, a $5 mic and a lot of valium, and was birthed in the 18 month wake of a stay at a psychiatric institution. That DIY approach and fraught personal circumstance don’t just inform the record but add to it. The desperate and distorted vocals that show up on “Sewer Princess” have an energy that unsettles, running alongside the simple synth lead and bassline, making their hypnotic progress a manic gallop to an uncertain finish. Elsewhere, the dirgey “Ice Grave Revisited” makes the most of tinny reverb and crushed sound design, all the more unnerving for not just a lack of polish, but its outright contempt for the very notion.
Of course wretchedness for its own sake doesn’t make for much of a listen – thankfully Another Cold Summer has some compelling instrumental grooves underneath those layers of grime. “Desecrate” is a hellish death-drive disco number, whose queasy guitar tone stands in contrast to its rock-solid mechanical rhythm. Elsewhere, the thrumming synthesizers that bounce along the kick-snare drums of “Worry” give the song an elastic quality that only serves to ratchet up the tension and acidic cynicism of its samples.
For all the harshness and disagreeability, there’s something deeply compelling about the album, a sense of genuine honesty that informs it, from the lurching desperation of “Fed Stalking” to the disintegrating trudge that closes it out on “Gangrenous Watchtowers”. Far from being a turn-off, the woefulness becomes something of an emotional base to experience (one hesitates to say “enjoy”) the album from, a vantage into dark and disturbing territory. Simply put,
