Dan Svizeny of Cough Cool has never needed much outside of a guitar, drum kit, and his natural skill for songwriting. He's never needed tours. He's never needed a photoshoot with stylish bedhead and a look that says, “don't call this my goddamn look.” He's never needed to move to Brooklyn. The notion of bandmates or a complementary writing partner are superfluous to Svizeny's craft. On “The Flames”, it's apparent all Svizeny needs is a shitty morning that began on the wrong side of the bed.
The refrain on the “The Flames” isn't breaking ground, in fact every facet of Svizeny's newest song has been done before, by himself as Cough Cool across two LPs on Bathetic. (And if you never knew, “bathetic” means producing anticlimax. Fitting, right?) And somehow, all it takes is the opening couplet “the modern era's a joke / you wanna wake up when you want” for it to feel brand new again. In those brief words, we feel like this guy gets it like we get it. We wanna say, “what's the friggin' difference” at the news of a Svizeny solo LP in 2014, we wanna ask “why not just call it Cough Cool, dude?”. Instead of fussing over silly questions, we hit repeat on “The Flames”; we think about all those goddamned frivolous arguments when he gets to “it's not a question / if you're telling answers / is it?” and we get back into bed.
