Casualties of Cool - Self-titled album

Casualties of Cool is a new Canadian group. In May of this year, they released their debut self-titled album. Casualties of Cool is led by the infamous Devin Townsend (a personal hero of mine), and is a brand new project, entirely separate from the Devin Townsend Project (DTP) and his solo catalogue. Alongside Townsend is Ché Dorval, who co-wrote and co-produced the album, as well as offering her considerable talents as a guitarist and vocalist on every track. Fans of DTP will remember Ms. Dorval from her vocal contributions on the album Ki. Though the majority of the instrumentation is handled by Townsend, he and Dorval enlisted a number of session musicians, most notably Jørgen Munkeby (of Shining and Jaga Jazzist) on saxophone.

It's quite hard to pin where exactly this album belongs genre-wise. Country music seems to be the biggest stylistic influence, but it is certainly not a country album. It is also undeniably bluesy, but it's unlike any blues I've ever heard. And with undertones of ambient/new-age music, akin to DTP's Ghost, throughout, Casualties of Cool have found an identity all their own. Their sound is one that, although slow and often light as a feather, is deceptively deep and engaging.

Casual of Cool is a very well-executed release from a couple of incredible musicians, and is by far the best thing I've heard all year. I expect big things from this group in the future.

First two tracks:

The fact that its difficult to put this into a genre is exactly the reason why it will go pretty much un-noticed by the masses. The modern day music industry can only function properly if they know exactly who the target audience is, if they don't know who to sell it to they don't know where to sell it. The masses are lazy and want the product delivering on a plate to them, most people wouldn't dream of trying to find something interesting to listen to that a friend hadn't told them about. Its just a part of life in the modern day, media driven world that we're unfortunate enough to live in.

It'll change, it always does.