Cold, Cold Heart – How The Other Half Live and Die – Album Review by Killian Laher

These days there are many bands ploughing the moody instrumental rock furrow, with varying degrees of success. One of the finer recent efforts is the debut album from Cold, Cold Heart. Despite their Hank Williams referencing name, there’s not much country going on here, icy keyboards dominate opening track Hannah, and as it progresses trebly guitar ripples through the background. It’s like The Cure’s slower moments but completely de-gothed, and blissed out instead. This mood continues with Wolf Eyes, You’re Staring, taking its sweet time to unfurl. Rather than building to a climax, this band deal in exquisite drifting across these seven tracks. Pretty, drowsy melodies abound on the lengthy crawl of Stand/Still and the muted chamber music of Megan, and the ringing guitars of An Elegy are very easy on the ear.

But it seems wrong to isolate individual tracks, the album is very much one to be taken as a whole. And you could do worse than take this. It’s available from their bandcamp page.

Tracklist –

1. Hannah
2. Wolf Eyes, You’re Staring
3. Stand/Still
4. Megan
5. An Elegy (For Martha)
6. Mountain
7. Anna