eOne Records – 4 SEP 2020
Top notch Jersey rock from the most unlikely of places
Cold Years‘ album Paradise might be the most authentic Jersey record of the past year, and it doesn’t even matter that the band is based out of Aberdeen, Scotland. As a Jersey kid born and bred that is high praise but something about this record is eerily close to home. The band is unapologetic; unabashedly not commercialized and seemingly without any desire for radio play.
That “up yours”attitude coupled with a blue collar ethos is the same combination that has carried Bruce Springsteen and The Gaslight Anthem as far as they’ve gotten in their careers. Cold Years take that recipe of defiance and working class rock and slap it around. The Garden State influences are evident, but nobody is going to accuse the lads of being anything less than authentic. For a debut album, Paradise seems seasoned, lyrically it’s both personal and relatable, it does the near impossible and manages to be both heart-on-its-sleeve and personal all at once.
The quartet fire off their opening shots on “31” an acoustic introduction with a pub-singalong feeling before turning into a sonic bar brawl. Raging guitars, pounding drums and gravel-throated vocals fuel the conflagration as Cold Years juxtapose the happiness of a family wedding with the reality of the world we share. Are they singing about Brexit, nationalism in a Trump/Boris political climate, police violence, riots? Why choose? This is an anthem fitting all of those and a plethora of other societal ills to go along with it.
By the time the band gets through the 43-minute Paradise the listener might feel the exhaustion in their legs, and its hard to say whether those heavy-legs came from a brisk jaunt through a lower-middle class neighborhood with Cold Years’ narrative as the tour guide or toe-tapping the impossible to ignore melodies that course throughout the album. The entirety of the record is solid, but for my money the emotiveness of “Dropout,” and the followup “62 (My Generation’s Falling Apart)” capture the spirit of down and out coastal living. Never give up anthems of loss and resilience, bubbling over with sick melodies swirl with refined yet gritty vocal acrobatics that have driven Paradise into the upper echelon of blue-collar rock and the optimism that is born out of being downtrodden in an area mocked despite its beauty.
My biggest complaint with Paradise is that I’m now well over fifteen times through the album and I’ve yet to stop discovering parts I love. I’ve found myself so engrossed in the storytelling of frontman Ross Gordon that I’ve missed out on a few of the musical tapestries, I’ve also gotten so caught up in the bombastic drums beating with an anger and resilience throughout the record that I’ve missed lyrics that seem to narrate points in my life. They aren’t changing the landscape of music on their debut, but that’s part of the charm of Garden State rock, it doesn’t need to be re-written so long as someone dusts off the book every now and again.
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/
