Gabriella Cohen: Blue No More | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Gabriella Cohen returns with a new full-length, infused with her signature blues-rocking and also that subversive ability to visit all sorts of styles without you even realising. Unassumingly self-released -I mean, it’s not the time to be making big industry moves, is it?- it just might be the time, however, to throw off the smothering blanket of the last couple of years and be Blue No More.

When I last checked in on Cohen, back around the time of her second official full-length, Pink Is The Colour Of Unconditional Love, she’d tripped off to Texas, taking her tricked-out blues-rock to SXSW and the world. I guess it’s authentically bluesy that things didn’t work out quite as planned: Cohen found herself depressed and down-and-out in Louisiana. From there she retreated to Melbourne, worked in a fish-and-chippery and, finally, headed back to Queensland, taking up residence in a shack on the back of her parent’s country property. Well, at least she dodged overseas exile and the worst of the great southern lockdowns.

Cohen has actually done some of her finest work in self-imposed isolation -I think the majority of Full Closure And No Details was recorded in a shed in the bush- so it shouldn’t be surprising that, along with a few sneaky trips to Brisbane and some sessions with Sam Cromack of Ballpark Music and producer JB Patterson, her latest outback sojourn soon churned out another album’s worth of music.

Maybe because we’ve been less trapped in our homes here in Brisbane, Blue No More is much more fully realised than a lot of iso records I’ve heard. It comes front-loaded with big, juicy singles, like this was an EP, not a full-length. Actually, contra our COVID experience, these cuts are jam-packed with Cohen’s musical friends, producing big, ebullient, throwback rock. For all the nostalgic recollections of failing relationships and other things lost to time that you’ll hear on Just For The Summer, But I Wanted To or Frangelico Dreams, the mood here is unconquerably upbeat, very full of the Beach Boys influence that Cohen says she’s been in thrall to.

With all of the rocking firepower up the front of the record, Blue No More becomes more sedate, shy and retiring as it progresses. The slow gospel, call-and-response of Son Of A Gun is already putting on the brakes, before cuts like Water and Seagull go fully acoustic and really very reflective and wistful. Love and life choices get mulled over in depth, but even here it never feels like Cohen gives in to despair. It’s a feeling I noticed on her last record, too. As blue as she might be, it’s almost as if Gabriella Cohen is incapable of letting it extinguish a happier tune in her head.

Three years ago I was fully expecting Gabriella Cohen to establish herself overseas, never looking back. In the ensuing time most people’s plans have been thoroughly pulled to pieces and so it is with Cohen, too. She has plenty of heartache to sing about and at this point and who knows what the future holds, but, as always, when I listen to her music, I can’t help but feel that no amount of the blues could ever really hold her back.

- Chris Cobcroft.