God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here

Description

Cold Gawd is the name under which California multi-instrumentalist Matt Wainwright creates tumultuous and wounded shoegaze music born from open chords and R&B melodies. His second collection, God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here, took shape during the winter of 2020 while he was working solo in a café in Chicago. Fueled by the dream of returning to his hometown of Rancho Cucamonga in California and reconnecting with old friends from former hardcore bands, Wainwright retreated with his coveted pink Jazzmaster bass, a set of effect pedals, and a laptop, writing the entire album in a month. In March 2021, he took the plunge and moved to Southern California, where he booked sessions with Gabe Largaespada at Open Ocean Records for mixing. Although he recorded all the instruments himself, the result feels like an experienced live band (which Cold Gawd is now, having become a six-member ensemble). Cascading walls of guitars swirl, crash, and undulate, framed by submerged rhythms and Wainwright's distant, defeated voice, shrouded in a purple haze. He cites as a central muse the commonalities between shoegaze and R&B, both obsessively focused on love, lust, and desire, in forms that are alternately grand and minor in tonality. The album's lyrics oscillate between the oblique and despair, aspiration and resignation—except for "Comfort Thug," a dark, largely improvised spoken word piece inspired by the notable lack of Black musicians in shoegaze. Cold Gawd is here to change that. God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here channels discomfort and melancholy into transparent anthems galvanized by escape, change, and introspection. The overwhelming closing track, "Passing Through the Opposite of What It Approaches," rises and hovers like threatening clouds, under which Wainwright sings (and his companion Arturo Ramirez screams) about what comes closest to the album's mission statement: leaving what you know, growing, and remembering why you left. For fans of Nothing, Deftones, my bloody valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, Whirr.