Cold Beat - Over Me LP
Cold Beat - Over Me LP
Label: Crime on the Moon
Late last year, Grass Widow's Hannah Lew released Worms/Year 5772, the first EP from her band Cold Beat, on her own label, Crime on the Moon. That shrewd collection channeled loss into captivating songs, which Lew wrote over four years while grappling with both the weight of her fathers’ death and her own insomnia. Cold Beat’s new album, Over Me, is an extension of that melancholia, a space where Lew confronts grief through punchy post-punk.
Lew’s songwriting shifts between separate but related states—life and death, shadow and sun, together and apart, here and there. There’s a pained goodbye to a familiar place on “Abandon”, where her space in San Francisco is described as “Like a heroine in an old story disappears when fingers turn the page.” She’s restless, turning towards an unfamiliar oblivion in the record’s poppiest number, “Out of Time”. The infectious “Collapse” takes place within a cataclysm as it’s happening, with violins plucking at the tension of displacement. But there’s a sense of acceptance there too, although less pronounced. On the stomping “Tinted Glass,” she croons: “Unknown location/ No heart attached.”
Grass Widow specialize in girl-group vocal acrobatics; Lew’s meaty basslines take instrumental precedence in their saltwater-scuffed garage songs, but her voice is harder to pick out amongst the band’s three-part harmonies. Over Me finds her writing and recording on her own minimalist terms; even the vocal arrangements are sparse—it’s virtually all Lew, and she has a lovely voice, expressive and breathy. Her voice is mixed a bit too low, making it hard to hear the lyrics, but that fits Over Me's broader theme of wrestling with and confronting identity. “Can’t see anything / Looking at my face / There’s nothing at all,” Lew confides to the listener in the pop-punk squalor of “Mirror”.
-Paula Meija for Pitchfork 2014