A pleasant surprise from Matt Cothran’s Coma Cinema project came this Monday, with the early release of his Abandoned Lands EP via band camp. Aside from Coma Cinema’s own contributions, which present some of his strangest and most brooding compositions yet, he also enlisted the help of two friends for the record, Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction having sequenced, and Lance Smith of Pandit bequeathing his mastering expertise. According to Cothran’s Abandoned Lands post over at Summertime In Hell, the whole affair was somewhat spontaneous in the record’s quick recording, unedited mistakes and hypnotic, ‘stream of consciousness’ lyricism.

Certainly Abandoned Lands is the closest Coma Cinema has come to terrifying; ‘Victims’ is a circular mesh of overdrive and reverberant chant, ‘Road Side Memorial’ heightening the gothic electronic theme with a few subtle tears and almost magical soundscapes. Coma Cinema’s usually pleasurable and easy going vocal lines tend to play smoothly as ever, despite the improvisational approach across his last three full length albums (available here). Not once do they sound awkward or out of place, instead holding their own as on ‘Blue Suicide’ and others, but this time founded upon far stranger instrumentation. ‘Burn A Church’ is the exception, breaking the incessant droning with a witch-like, visceral utterance, intermittent amongst such instances of Small Black-esque fuzz and gothic 80s experimentalist pop.

Since last Sunday was Matt Cothran’s Birthday, for which Kitteh Fur’s cover of Road Side Memorial was manufactured, that song, along with Burn a Church and Road Side Memorial are attached below. You can download the whole EP at name your price by clicking here.

Coma Cinema - Burn A Church (MP3)

Coma Cinema - Road Side Memorial (MP3)

Kitteh Fur - Road Side Memorial (Coma Cinema Cover) (MP3)

Backseat Dreamer is the moniker of DIY electronic musician Sean Neuse, who started making music in 2006 whilst drumming for bands Coma Cinema and Culture Prophet and playing guitars, drums and keys with his other band Le Chevre. He put out his 16-minute debut EP on Atlanta’s Stickfigure Recordings (Deerhunter, Xiu Xiu) in 2008, and his subsequent debut full length, “The Colors Of Dreams, They’re In You”, on the same label in July 2010. The synth heavy dance music of Culture Prophet is certainly an influence, though at the same time there’s something strangely ambient and niched about the lead song ‘Consider’.

Coma Cinema, known for his serene pop rather than his aptitude at manipulating underground club songs, gives us an interesting take. Taking 0ut some of his band mate’s flailing synthesizers and replacing them with a hypnotic stop-start beat and shifting the emphasis on to the vocals, Matt Cothran’s touch is becoming one which is carefully, but excellently organic and distinctive. Download versions touched and un-touched below.

Backseat Dreamer - Consider (MP3)

Backseat Dreamer - Consider (Coma Cinema Remix) (MP3)

Coma Cinema is the solo project of South Carolina dweller Matt Cothran, who began writing under the freshly-famed moniker as a teenager in 2005. Since then he’s kept up a notoriously high output, having released three albums in the same number of years, arguably climaxing with ‘Blue Suicide’, only the first of these stunning creations to receive a priced physical release. Until now, he’s taken the unequivocally modest recourse of releasing entire albums as free downloads as his philosophy, asking that if one feels the need to compensate Coma Cinema they should do nothing more than to ‘share the music with others’.

In the short piece of writing which accompanied the album’s release, Cothran wrote that “[Blue Suicide] is a record I could never make again”, and even the most inattentive listen of Coma Cinema’s records will demonstrate this confined and depressive grandeur to be as such. It is this dauntingly calm and collected reserve which spills vividly in to the recordings, which are for the most part downbeat, and viscerally illustrative, though hoisted up in to reluctant positivity by their naive, weathered simplicity and closely pitched allegories. This vocal but reserved storytelling is occasionally reminiscent of folk, but often woodsy songs retain a certain street wise imagery - the dominant and idiosyncratic feature of a band where elements of both the rural and the urban might seep. Blue Suicide is projected as somewhat enticing yet withdrawn, emotionally strung yet strangely mysterious and abstract - giving off simultaneously a yearning and a defensive signal that there’s plenty more wisely orchestrated arrangements still holed up inside Coma Cinema’s illustrious lyrical mind - if he wishes to share them, that is.

The music does what it can to mirror this reflectively poetic and private aesthetic, and the concise avenue of accessibly Beatles-esque lo-fi which Coma Cinema carves is one which has been widened and eclecticised on the latest instalment. It features the first explicit use of electronic accompaniment which Coma Cinema has been involved with, developing that scratchy and unaltered home recording sound into something a little fuller and wider-reaching than before. The orchestration remains wonderfully dynamic - peaking on ‘Caroline, Please Kill Me’, the witty and buzzing anthem and the greatest spontaneous guitar ballad Jeff Magnum never penned, and re-aligning itself with those solitary levels Coma Cinema has perhaps made his name with on songs like ‘Her Sinking Sun’ and ‘Greater Vultures’. The latter plays host to such typically sunken word-play; ‘unless you’re willing to eat what the vultures will not’ and perhaps one of ‘Blue Suicide’s most striking of endings, the relentless pounding of synthesisers and stark life advice: ‘no-one cares, its easier to quit’ - repeated several times over on ‘Her Sinking Sun’.

‘Blue Suicide’ ends up feeling like the Coma Cinema album to beat - having formed the most complete of works from Coma Cinema to date but not at the cost of raw musical instinct or emotional instability. It dropped March 15th via the Coma Cinema website, where you can download it for free. If you feel like putting forth some financial support, you can buy the vinyl and cassette from Wonder Beard Tapes and Fork And Spoon Records.

Coma Cinema - Her Sinking Sun (MP3)

Coma Cinema - Caroline, Please Kill Me (MP3)

Coma Cinema - Greater Vultures (MP3)

coma cinema :: her sinking sun from Dino Rossi on Vimeo.

This week, music from Denver and Brooklyn with Woodsman’s psychedelic second album ‘Rare Forms’, an introduction to Kurt Vile, with a song from The War On Drugs (where he is guitarist), before a track from his upcoming album ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’, due in March. New music from a band called Prussia, with their wobbly electro-turns-90s indie pop on song Girl Cops from their most recent Band Camp EP, Four For Attention. Swedish balaeric pop due Korallreven have the characteristic luscious ambience Memoryhouse worked in to their single ‘Honey Mine’, and to close the show, a track from lo-fi one man project Coma Cinema, who is set to release his third album, and first with a physical release, Blue Suicide, in 2011.

[LISTEN TO RESONANCE SATURDAY 6.30]

[DOWNLOAD MP3 OF SHOW]

Woodsman - Insects (MP3)

The War On Drugs - Arms Like Boulders (MP3)

Kurt Vile - Jesus Fever (MP3)

Prussia - Girl Cops (MP3)

Korallreven - Honey Mine (Memoryhouse Remix) (MP3)

Coma Cinema - Her Sinking Sun (MP3)