by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
When not playing together with indie darlings Strange Ranger, Portland’s Nathan Tucker and frequent contributor Fiona Woodman make music as Cool Original (fka Cool American), creating fuzzy power-pop and buzzing slacker rock with a sense of gentle humor. Together with Andy Rusinek and Ethan Conroy, the quartet’s melodies are big and memorable, sounding something like Elliott Smith or Matthew Sweet writing Weezer songs, every hook hitting just between sugary exuberance and self-reflective introspection. After a slew of releases with Good Cheer Records, the band self-released their latest album, I Never Said I Didn’t Care, back in July, a fully realized record that hangs heavy on the feedback and even heavier on the blistering anthems. It’s a great record for the summer, and it works it’s magic as we head into the fall too.
The video for “Not Like That,” the album’s centerpiece, was directed, shot, and edited by Fiona Woodman, an up and coming filmmaker that is off to a great start. The clip, shot in gloriously elegant black and white, goes in and out of focus, with interesting angles and plenty of simplistic imagery… it’s like a film school project gone right. The song’s lyrics feel like personal reflections of fragmented memories, “I saw you wait in the cold. Grease on a rain slicked road. I didn’t notice it then but i remember it now” and the video captures this in its images of moving highways and passing cities, everything its own blur in time.