On The Cool Cloud of Okayness, a folk-punk paragon rises slowly from the ashes
thefader.comFrom its first notes to its last, The Cool Cloud of Okayness is an impressively patient album. Its songs drive slowly, powered by the ever-present engine of Tara Jane O’Neil’s towering bass guitar, with her pithy but plain-sung vocals at the wheel and an ensemble of co-conspirators along for the ride — each contributing something essential, none in a hurry to outpace the rest. “A cool cloud of okayness covered us for a season / Then a strange wind blew a strange day,” O’Neil sings at the onset of the record’s opener and title track, accompanied by absentminded acoustic strumming and, later, Marisa Anderson’s plaintive “ghost” guitar.
It’s a multilayered image: simple at face value but unfurling as the album billows with context. At a meta level, it’s an apt description of the way O’Neil operates here, cloaked in humility but miles above the mediocre.
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