Cosmopaark – Backyard (2024)
Cosmopaark is a French band that came together in 2018 and bring the world its potent, distilled take on shoegaze. Since their 2019 EP Sunflower and its flagship tune ‘Mr. BigYellowSun’ (which has received almost two million streams on Spotify), they have laid claim to their own little slice of guitar-gliding, dream-popping territory. Ostensibly a guitar-based trio, they add keyboard parts like musical backgrounds depicting a rainy wash of textures in the atmospheric sections of their songs.
And that’s pretty much where we find the band on their 2024 EP Backyard, a five-song selection that comes a year after their full length 2023 album and I can’t breathe enough. At about 20 minutes, the EP comes in at almost exactly half the length of last year’s album, making us wonder if we might have gotten a full album had the band waited another year. Whatever the reason for releasing an EP, the important thing is that it feels like a complete statement with it’s own albeit short arc.
Backyard opens with the upbeat ‘Starve’ that finds lead singer and guitarist Clément Pélofy ruminating on a sense of isolation that permeates the EP even if the lyrics don’t always make the best sense. Lines like “Leave me downstairs, don’t starve with me/ Let me, I’m drowning, falling, save me” are a little hard to decipher. But in ‘Olive Tree’ where the guitar sounds like it is being played on an old tape, Pélofy sings of an unnamed thing, “It’s fossilised/ Far underground/ Covered in leaves/ From olive trees.”
As the EP goes on, the concrete images work the best and one starts to get the sense of loss that the songs hint at, as if they are edging their way around something they’d rather not explicitly state. The exception is the song ‘Hole’ where, during a “silent night” Pélofy repeats “Feathers line the inside/ Of the box where you lie.” These slow revelations are as gentle as the music itself, which manages to sound melancholy even though all songs but one zip along at a quick, if not exactly peppy pace. The juxtapositions of dreamy guitar scapes with passages of churning distortion pass by almost unnoticed. But that’s shoegaze for you.
Backyard takes a few listens to settle into, but the more one hears it, the more it reveals. The placid vocals are probably the only fault to find here. We get it. It’s par for the course with the genre, but a lyric sheet should be a requirement for listening to this EP.
Find out more about Cosmopaark on their Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.
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