Cold House

Cold House

Editorial Reviews
From URB Magazine
Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit; experimental hip-hop and moppish guitar pop can go hand in hand! The Chicago-based Aesthetics label, in its fifth year, strikes out in a new direction with each release, venturing in the last two years into such varied realms as cello-heavy intelligentsia jazz via the dazzling work of 33.3 and the freakishly deep rhymes and jarring beats of Daniel Givens. But Hood, an accomplished yet relatively muted guitar ensemble from England, are some of the last people you'd expect to see working with Anticon's Dose One and Why?, two of the individuals responsible for cLOUDDEAD's disturbingly nasal and stylistically insightful hip-hop/ambient album on Mush.

And yet Hood somehow pulls it off as effortlessly as a gingerly executed exercise in jazz-club jamming. The lead track, "The Removed All Trace That Anything Had Ever Happened Here," eases out of warm-bodied guitars and a slight click-pop beat into the dark, dramatic British gloom of Appliance (or even Radiohead), but turns rabid from Chris Adam's lilting vocals into the fractured lexicon of Dose One. Cold House isn't all mop-hop, though; "Enemy of Time" languishes under the weight of strings, piano and clarinet, while "The Winter Hit Hard" jumps straight into Mille Plateaux's clicking sandbox with a pail full of reverb and erstwhile dub verve. Yet among all these accomplishments, Hood's Cold House ultimately proves that when mixed with such subtle grace, strange stylistic bedfellows can make for a great new set of Aesthetics.

Heath K. Hignight

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