Lo and Behold!

In the deepest recesses of the country, popular culture seems
to experience fantastic mood swings. The hamlets digest the spillover
from the metropolis, until whatever’s left of the fads is pumped out of
the cobblestone well in the form of some trippy, nuanced mélange
of a genre, which then—as is customary—begins to devour the
popularity of its source material. Then the world goes on; the
caterpillar hides in its cocoon ’til it’s time to fly away, and
everybody waits for what’s next. But before that happens, magical
gestations occur in the most silent of bowels.

Hinting at the cyclical, mysterious, and plain wonderful nature of
cocoons is an easy mark, though, when you’re navigating the silken
pupae of Cotton Jones and, more specifically, their fluttering debut
album, Paranoid Cocoon.

That Paranoid Cocoon dabbles in ’60s psychedelic folk and
jazzy pop isn’t strange on its own; nor is the fact that the
duo—comprised of Michael Nau, former bandleader of Page France,
and Whitney McGraw—resides in Cumberland, Maryland, a parish that
boasts a grand total of just over 20,000 citizens. What’s strange is
that such a well-endowed musical roar emerged from such a quiet quartet
of lungs.

Cotton Jones’ debut is marked by mellow drifts of shoegazer
melancholy, with tracks like “Gotta Cheer Up” offering glimpses into a
spooky, reverb-dripping, grainy movie reel, like discarded soundtracks
from an Ed Wood production. There are sentimental numbers, too, which
seep with bubble-slick finger-picking, distant drumming, sunny organs,
and the timeless harmonies of the Nau/McGraw duet—equal parts
rustic back-porch pajama party and deadly serious post-Americana
vortex. To clarify, the band’s psychedelic-soul hybrid gets a lot of
undue comparisons to the Doors; Nau’s mystic muses more accurately
align him with the majesty of the somber tortoise than with Jim
Morrison’s boasted lizard nobility.

Whichever way you side with Cotton Jones—and there are three
sides: their indelible grasp of subtlety, their manipulation of what
has proven to be a viable musical milieu, and their gift of a superbly
captured moment in time—there’s no denying Paranoid Cocoon is a terribly substantial statement, not just within the lexicon of
2009’s best albums, but especially after their impending, albeit
unplanned, spillover.