A multi-disciplinary artist and singer-songwriter based in Victoria, British Columbia, Ora Cogan makes music that is at once darkly beguiling and richly dreamlike. Drawing on her bewitching vocals and meticulously elegant compositions, Cogan has released several albums and toured extensively, even earning a personal invite from dream pop legends Mazzy Star to open for one of their rare California shows in 2018. This month sees the release of new album Bells in the Ruins, a record which sees Ora Cogan continue to explore her singular style which sits somewhere at an otherworldly intersection between dream pop, indie rock and psych-tinged folk.
The Mazzy Star influence is immediately apparent, as on the velvet curtain sway of opener ‘Sleeping’. David Parry adds bass and slide guitar which, along with Keenan Mittag-Degala percussion and subtle synths from Reggie Bast, carry Cogan’s vocals like an updraft. The track comes complete with a video, directed by Natasha Lavdovsky, which doubles down on the surreal atmosphere and proves to be the perfect companion.
It finds the masked figure from the album’s cover floating in the ocean alone, a stark vision of otherness that alternates between floating languorously, struggling to climb onto a small rock and standing indifferent as the tide ebbs and flows around it. This oddness is contrasted with cuts to spangles of sunlight dancing across the water’s surface in a fitting visual allusion to the transient beauty across the album.
and all through the ruins
the bells are ringing out
Bells in the Ruins is never content to settle into a groove, morphing and reshaping across its nine tracks. The jittery, off-kilter ‘Kills’ feels almost manic next to the lush and lazy ‘Tell’, while ‘Skull’ lands somewhere between the two, a persistent drum beat doing its best to stop Cogan’s ethereal vocals from drifting off into the ether. ‘Fixe’ represents both one of the record’s strangest moments and the clearest representation of its spirit, the guitar sneaking and slinking over ticking percussion and a swirling background ambience as Cogan delivers vocals in a breathy rush, each line spilling from the end of the last.
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Bells in the Ruins is out now on Prism Tongue Records and you can get it from the Ora Cogan Bandcamp page.
Photo by Zoe Alma