(((O))) : Ora Cogan – Hare & Hounds

Somehow entirely new to me Ora Cogan has wandered in with a decade-plus career behind her. It can be a pleasant sensation to find an artist with some history who’s had time to work out who they are. It’s her first time here in Birmingham, on a quiet Monday night. The UK is the last stretch at the end of a month in Europe touring last year’s Formless album. Her music melds a range of influences into a singular strand of gothic country. Or something like that; it throws up a lot of vague comparisons, they aren’t much help either, forgive me if they creep in later. 

Facing that Monday audience on the first night of this run is Michael B Thomas. Another singer-songwriter I assumed I was unaware of, but who turns out to be Thomas Barr formerly of Leeds indie garage-types Party Hardly. He’s started writing more grown-up songs and gone solo. Counter intuitively ‘going solo’ means he now has a bigger band bearing an approximation of his name. New single ‘Skeleton on Strings (SOS)’ is a gentle indie-country sigh but, unless I’m mistaken, they don’t play it. Opener ‘Berlin’ comes out wrong somehow, lumpier. It doesn’t quite get the lo-fi sweetness of the recording. While capable, the band don’t seem fully relaxed into the songs, straining a little against the softer, quieter material. Closing on ‘Test Tube Baby’ they finally play harder and faster, and it’s the most cohesive and convincing part of their set.

Ora Cogan‘s music hovers and shimmers between forms, drunk with sound. Wine red and coffee black, a full melodic cloud that’s not quite a drone but a warm thrum, thick and iridescent. Her voice sits inside the music not out front or on top. Pure and angelic but smudged, often just sound. I expect she has come to slightly tire of her vocals being called dreamy, but they do have a gentle, edge of sleep, ease. The pain is way in the back, mostly. In the knowing, not out garishly on display. But it’s there, of course it’s there.

The songs are romantic and elemental, adrift below the sun and stars. This is a different band to the one that made Formless, but they play from right inside the songs, road tested and completely locked in. If Cogan’s voice tends to take the spotlight it’s worth pointing out that she is also a great guitarist, with a soft touch fluency that, like her vocals, often seems more about feel and sound than whatever the song is supposed to be doing. She also neglects to play the recent single (‘Ways Of Losing’, possibly on account of it being a duet), but the set splits between songs from Formless and covers.   

Against the frame of other people’s songs her wonky, wayward spirit is perhaps more obvious. She does PJ Harvey’s ‘To Bring You My Love’, and its feral command is turned heat sick and woozy by time in the desert. She sings ‘Werewolf’, a Michael Hurley song I only really know via Cat Power, who is perhaps a reasonable signpost to Ora’s individual way with songs. While ‘Katie Cruel’ has seen strong versions in recent years from Lingua Ignota, and what it currently amuses me to call the ‘inexplicably popular’ Lankum, it’s a song most identified with Karen Dalton. Cogan’s version is more up-tempo than any of them, wrapped up in a blanket of distortion.

Dalton also had a way of bending songs into her own shape, it’s not that Cogan particularly sounds like her but perhaps they share something in temperament. Following her own winding path they end on album highlight ‘Feel Life’, a rush of chiming post-punk guitars that accelerates into an extended ending like the Banshees playing Neu! It’s hard not to find yourself taken with them.