From its first notes to its last, The Cool Cloud of Okayness is an impressively patient album. Its songs drive slowly, powered by the ever-present engine of Tara Jane O’Neil’s towering bass guitar, with her pithy but plain-sung vocals at the wheel and an ensemble of co-conspirators along for the ride — each contributing something essential, none in a hurry to outpace the rest. “A cool cloud of okayness covered us for a season / Then a strange wind blew a strange day,” O’Neil sings at the onset of the record’s opener and title track, accompanied by absentminded acoustic strumming and, later, Marisa Anderson’s plaintive “ghost” guitar.
It’s a multilayered image: simple at face value but unfurling as the album billows with context. At a meta level, it’s an apt description of the way O’Neil operates here, cloaked in humility but miles above the mediocre.
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