If an album's liner notes are a concise summation of an artist’s intentions, then soul and rhythmic funk play an integral role in C.O.C.O.’s mission statement. But supposing that Play Drum + Bass was evidence of C.O.C.O.’s trip across these vast plains of funk, I can only assume they experienced the bargain package tour. Shuttling to and from every blatant musical road sign and marker, C.O.C.O.’s self-guided tour through the crumbled tomb of The Meters manages to get lost along the way in their ongoing search for danceable beats and flashes of inspiration. Some call this inspiration the legendary Funkosopher’s Stone: rumored to be capable of turning even the dullest grooves into gold. With it, even the most monotonous lo-fi pop can be transformed into the guttural, throbbing riffs of the 1970s. But it’s clear that after wandering the hillside catacombs of Parliament and rummaging through the mummified remains of ESG, C.O.C.O. left empty-handed, with only patches of dirt stained on their funk visions as proof of their efforts.
An exercise in minimalism, Play Drums + Bass is really the sum of its parts. The duo Olivia Ness and Chris Sutton play drums and bass. There it is. The album sets off quite well with a short glimpse of one of the few, truly groove-riddled composition seen in any of the tracks. “Good” cackles with Liquid Liquid hi-hats and plucked-string molasses while maintaining the minimalist core of this drum and bass-only band. But with this inherent simplicity, C.O.C.O. begins to swerve toward the musical cul-de-sac of garage rock revivalism, forcing the bassline to dilute into an expendable substitution for revival’s guitar fuzz, as the album retracts into a shell of predictable rock archetypes. Gone are the throbbing beats of a metronomic bass, only to be hidden underneath a wave of circular drum lines and standard rock compositions. “We Gotta Right” propels C.O.C.O.’s drum set forward with shambled aimlessness underneath the slack-jawed teen punk lyric “I gotta right to think whatever I feel/ And that’s ‘cause I’m so fucking real.” When they’re not uttering the Wilde-like prose wit of “We Gotta Right,” they’re urgently thrashing and shouting ‘woo!’ in repeated exclamation, as the bassline sluggishly climbs a three-note scale on “The End.”
The tragedy of Play Drums + Bass is not what it is, but what it could have been. And what saves C.O.C.O. from the cesspit of meaningless fads is how funk could be part of the architecture of DIY-themed arrangement. Unfortunately, in the end they inexorably become less garage funk conceptualism and more drum-meets-bass gimmick, with little distinction from the string of garage revival converts seen in the last ten years. One step forward into ESG funk minimalism, two steps back into rock primitivism. As a standard garage band, they have a few more interesting qualities than the genre’s normal fare. But as a band who attempts to renew the garage genre with innovative musical influences and an interesting bass-meets-drum concept, reiterating the worn customs of simplistic thrashing and chord progression of a genre becomes more of a bone of contention than if they were far more conventional.
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