“Writing this album was a very much a lifeline,” explains Ora Cogan of new full-length, Formless, coming next month on Prism Tongue Records. Taking shape during the darkest days of the pandemic, the songs came to represent a space in which Cogan could pour every thought and emotion, a place to both unload her troubled mind and pick through the resulting deluge, as though to view personal pain from a place of remove. The result proved “transformative and healing, as she puts it. “Re-calibrating an internal compass constantly thrown off by the magnetism of a deranged world.”
Sonically, the album builds upon Ora Cogan’s previous record Bells in the Ruins, blurring the distinctions between dream pop, psych, country and folk to create a sound rooted in traditional balladry yet constantly pushing boundaries. Guest appearances from the likes of Y La Bamba and Lankum’s Cormac Mac Diarmada add further dimensions, and the result is somehow at once cinematic and intimate, Cogan accumulating small details as a means to broach the wider sweep of our times. A style willing to delve into the darker side of things, to poke bruises and scars alike, but always with the purpose of challenging the cruelties of our world, and with the unfailing hope of emerging on some more welcoming other side. “I want to feel good,” as Cogan concludes. “I want other people to feel good. My way of getting there is going towards the pain, through the swamps and finding beauty in the ridiculousness of being human. If it hurts, I want to roll around in it a bit before metamorphosing.”
With its picture of social isolation, the album’s lead single ‘Cowgirl’ serves as our introduction to this world. A sedate jam that’s slow in the way late night always is, the air clouded with one too many cigarettes, something like panic or regret building with a slow drip. But counter to this rising sensation is a sense of distance too. The track plays as a half dream, an out of body experience, a survey of those things felt so keenly at every other hour of the day as taken from above. “There was blood in the corner of your mouth / Stars were falling,” as Cogan sings, “All the dogs were howling / Streetlights were glowing.” Once upon a time, it might have seemed a contradiction to offer this weave of the physical and ethereal, the close and distant, but we have all lived through the same trauma. Have come learn there is no contradiction at all.
I went out on the roof
I felt so dizzy and
I saw the wasteland moving towards me
Someone come get me now
The single comes complete with a suitably cinematic video directed by K Bray Jorstad, utilising VHS/Super 8 textures to evoke the barroom smoke and nocturnal atmosphere. Watch it below:
Formless is out on the 25th August via Prism Tongue Records and you can pre-order it from the Prism Tongue Bandcamp page.
Cover photo by Stasia Garraway, album design by Malcolm Jack