GUV

Forever a pop chameleon and RSTB staple, Ben Cook slips on his latest persona with an almost effortless ease. Over years spent weaving through garage, country croons, power pop, synth waves, and New Waves, Cook has proven there are few genre drags he can’t don. For his latest, he drops the Young from his moniker to become GUV, a peerless purveyor of Britpop for an era already in thrall to the shadows of the ‘90s. Drawing on his childhood abroad, Cook taps into a wide array of sounds under the Brit umbrella. Opening up with baggy beats, he quickly wanders into smeared corners that glow and gaze, push the tempos, and ensconce themselves in haze. Flipping the dial through the corners of the craft that didn’t latch as hard over here, GUV caresses the catalogs of the Roses, sure, but also Curve, Swervedriver, the JMC in their less crusted days, The Mondays, and the more lacquered ends of the Sarah Recs catalog.

Crafted with his forever foil James Matthew VII, the pair eschew their usual dip into the deep-end dial. The last few albums have seen them bouncing psychedelic country off of the power pop plateaus, but this time they grabbed at childhood fixations to turn nostalgia into a dissertation in pre-millennium pop chemistry. The collaborations go deeper than just Ben and James, and a full roster of pop waxers, including members of Color Green, Turnstile, Django Django, and Photographic Memory, turn the album into a slick n’ supple dream. What the album does best is capture the genre’s love of dazed delirium, a feeling of being lost; in love, in substances, in music, in melancholy. Between breakbeats and blurred hooks, Cook turns the record into one of his best yet. Often he creates records that end up as indelible scrapbooks of sound, but on Warmer Than Gold he grabs tight to a very specific aura of the past and repaints it with fresh colors.