Diandra Reviews It All

Jack Cooper’s Sandgrown is the epitome of slacker pop, and I love it. The Blackpool native captures the muggy weather of this British town, and gives each track guitar notes that drop like rain into puddles of abstract feelings. If ever there was a moment in your life where you had NO CLUE who you are, where you were going, and did not care anymore, then honey you were “sandgrown”.

Yes, I am turning “sandgrown” into a verb/ action. I have been “sandgrowing” through life for some time, and Jack Cooper places into insturmentals the drudged feeling of walking through your life as if it were a giant, cloudy day. Somehow, you are moving, yet you feel so lazy about it; as if motivation is no long causal to actions. Songs such as, “North of Anywhere”, “Gynn Square”, and “On A Pier In The Wind” are like poems to the locations you went physically, but failed to enter spiritually. Personally, I think its brilliant that setting plays such a role in Cooper’s lyrics, themes, and even song titles like, “A Net” and “Memphis, Lancashire”. Every moment that has sentimentally stunned and stumped us can be traced back to a physical location, and the details that environment carried. From how the air felt when you fell in love to how the grass smelled when you broke up, Cooper uses surroundings as platforms for his lyrical/ life observances. Cooper’s voice has a quiet imaginativeness to it that helps you enter these picturesque places, but, more importantly, his voice has a sweet simplicity that converts how lax it is into insightfulness.

Jack Cooper sings his songs as if he is amongst friends that have no idea he is their in presence but no longer with them in the present. Every person has had that “limbo” moment when their mind drifted from the table they sat before, and their friends and lovers became background shapes to the visions they saw in their head. How we drift in and out of the lives we live seems like a pertinent and timelessly poignant theme for any artist, but not many can make the simplicity of this dilemma/cause so riveting. All Cooper needs is a guitar-driven melody and his laid-back voice to reach into your heart, and show you how and why it stops and starts emotionally beating. Thus, when I talk about Cooper having a “slacker pop” sound, I do not mean it in a “bad” or “lazy” way as much as he arranges his music to hold a sense of melancholy and fragility within it. Sometimes, we slack off, not because we want to “bum around”, as much as that we feel like bums. As hard as that is, Jack Cooper’s Sandgrown is a recorded, musical testament to the people who feel weird, side-tracked, and uncertain about what they are doing in life, love, and career. Hence, Sandgrown is more than a title or album; it is a feeling. For More Information On Jack Cooper And To Buy Sandgrown On August 25 Click Here.