The third studio album from the Aberdeen punk band, Cold Years, called A Different Life takes a hard look at life around the band, while still maintaining a worldly view of growing up in this era. Much like their breakthrough sophomore LP, Goodbye To Misery, this album features a great blend of a sound similar to Green Day, The Gaslight Anthem, and Social Distortion. As lead singer Ross Gordon shouts along with his bandmates on “Roll With It,” “I’m dead, ’cause I want a different life!,” it’s hard to not rally around his words of wanting change. Recorded at The Barber Shop Studios in New Jersey by producer Brett Romnes (Hot Mulligan, Boston Manor, The Movielife), the mindset of capitalizing on the best/most emphatic sections of their last record, mixed with a steady eye towards the future, leads to Cold Years continuing their momentum here on A Different Life.
Read More “Cold Years – A Different Life”Review: Cold Years – Goodbye to Misery
Years ago, and barely out of my teens, I scribbled music mends broken hearts in the margins of a notebook. I was trying to put to words how finding music, and getting lost in the perfect song, could save your life. It was melodramatic. It was true.
Over the past two years, while locked down in a global pandemic, we as a society have experienced previously unimaginable trauma. Mass death. Isolation and fear. Uncertainty and rage. And as we begin to navigate what life looks like next, I’m reminded of those four little words I once scratched across a piece of lined paper. Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think I have a universal answer, but I know for me, in my moments of despair, I reconnected with music and it pulled me out. Last year, discovering Turnstile flipped a fuse in my brain that showed me how to love music again. It unlocked something within me and reminded me what it was like to feel the joy of finding a new favorite band. And this year, it’s discovering an album that feels like it could have only been made after what we all just went through. An album that not only helps define the state of the world but the ethos of a generation. The album is Goodbye to Misery; the band is Cold Years.
I’ve always used music as a metric of remembrance, with periods in my life defined by the albums I was listening to. But it goes further than that. At the core, music is what we have long used to tell our stories. To pass down the legacy, the learnings, the trials, and the current mindset from one generation to another. You can listen to music and hear the pain, hear the joy, hear the triumphs, and feel the defeats. It’s a way to mark our personal lives and build milestones of collective memory. And Goodbye to Misery is an album that could only have been birthed from the well of COVID. An album that paints the state of the world with an American Idiot like clarity and mirrors a generational attitude back through the speakers. And it’s done with a maturity and grace far beyond expectations for a band on just their sophomore release.
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