by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Over the last decade the brooding and scintillating Jack Cooper has been making some of the most quietly excellent guitar music to emerge from England. Partnering with James Hoare (Veronica Falls), he made plaintive and soft indie pop as Ultimate Painting but that project met an untimely demise in 2018 after a disruption in their relationship. It didn’t keep Cooper down for long though, as a year later he formed a new project, Modern Nature, this time with Will Young of BEAK>.
This project allows Cooper to broaden his experimental leanings more than his work with Ultimate Painting allowed: where the latter’s sweet guitar pop was digested in easy bites, he now crafts ambitious and open-ended structural records. Their full-length debut How To Live took as its thesis the blurred lines between city and country (spurred by a visit to the country home of noted British filmmaker Derek Jarman, where Cooper witnessed a brutish nuclear station rise above the pastoral landscape). Where before Modern Nature found urgency in exploring their sonic boundaries though - dipping into everything from krautrock to free jazz - Annual is a conceptual rather than experimental piece.
Annual documents one year in Cooper’s life, with his thoughts drawn from a journal filled with ideas and notes. It’s a cyclical piece, journeying from the dawn of spring to the solitude of winter. The shifts are elusive, minuscule, but they are there: in this way, Annual demands several concentrated listens, to allow Cooper’s nuanced sound to flush in and out of one’s mind. The song titles hint at the cyclical nature - we start at spring’s ‘Dawn,’ passing ‘Mayday,’ surveying the ‘Harvest’ before arriving at the deadening ‘Wynter’ - and these surmise the record better than a track listing could, for each song subtly melts into the next, with no abrupt beginnings or endings. It’s a mini-album, running for a mere twenty minutes, yet somehow this briefness suits the passing of the seasons: who hasn’t only just begun to embrace the haze of summer before autumn’s crispness provokes one to cower indoors?
Young is absent this time around, allowing the saxophone of Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers) to take greater prominence - alongside the work of percussionist Jim Wallis - particularly on the riveting ‘Halo,’ where Tobias rounds off the track with a growing presence. Guest vocalist Kayla Cohen also delightfully contributes vocals on ‘Harvest,’ the most sonically muscular track, full of stabbing guitars and warm rhythm. In the loud scream of mainstream music, low-key and ruminative affairs like Annual are a welcome respite for those who seek it or need it. A line is rarely ushered in above a whisper by Cooper, his guitar almost as hushed. Cooper’s quietly devastating vocal recalls the wondrous falsetto of Nick Drake, an undoubted influence - it’s always been the case that he sees himself as a link in the grand British folk tradition, a purveyor and producer of its organic notes in the modern era. This is downtempo music and resolutely contemplative, as it should be considering its concept. There’s a lurking romanticism to Annual, but never in an overbearing way. ‘Dawn’ is an appropriately dewy and hesitant awakening from slumber as spring announces its arrival amidst a quiet flurry of strings. The music does indeed start to flourish on ‘Flourish,’ Tobias’ playful saxophone entering and sparring with the ambling guitar lines. ‘Mayday’ is the only real time the instrumentation rises above the darkened parapet to allow some jangle pop.
By the end, as the melodic and melancholic ‘Wynter’ fades into the distance, one wonders whether Annual has been a lamentation for a wasted year or a paean to a time of hope. Nothing truly seems to have happened over its course, yet one leaves Modern Nature’s latest offering quietly transformed. After the turbulence of Ultimate Painting, Cooper seems at peace in Modern Nature, Annual’s ambition another step forward for him.