Look, A Band: Cobalt and the Hired Guns

not sure what's happening here

As with several things, I was first introduced to Cobalt and the Hired Guns by my friend Hannah, because she throws music at people. I did give them a bit of a listen at the time, but I’m going to do it properly now for the purposes of blogging and helping the music industry, and because they're actually awesome.

Thanks to shouting until I was given information about them, according to the Internet, Cobalt and the Hired Guns are Matt Hart (bass, guitar, vocals), Tom Fort (bass, guitar, vocals), Jesse Alexander (drums, vocals), and Mike Roth (bass, guitar, vocals), formed at Oberlin College, Ohio, although they’re mainly based in Chicago now, and have been around since 2003, although their first album, Jump The Fence, was released in 2008 – they’ve done another one since then - Everybody Wins!. No messing about for these guys, this is serious business – unless you count that apparently one of them uses the song Slow Down at the end of the day in a primary school as a soundtrack to the kids packing up.

Their song MySpace (Like You Like Me) is the one I keep getting told to listen to (by Hannah). It’s good and fun, very jumpy-abouty and happy, which probably makes it all the more unusual that I like it so much. It’s the kind of music you use in the background of a Persil advert, if that makes sense – the sort of ‘happy kids roll in the mud and climb trees’ feel to it. I like You Left Your Sweater better though (that kind of rhymes), it’s got even more of the active party-time-ness in it. But then there's also Oregon, I Know, which isn't anything like what I usually listen to because I don't like guitar solos just for the sake of them, but dayummmmm.

I could go on about all their songs, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun. What you should know is that it is exactly that – fun. Fun, happy stuff, one of the few bands that I like listening to that I could show to my younger siblings without really being considered a bad influence. The tags on their bandcamp say “americana pop punk rock fun horn section upbeat Chicago”, which sums it all up really and also counts as a sort of tl;dr for this whole post. If you like horns, if you like pop punk, if you like people from Chicago and you like bands that really know how to make very pretty music and are going to be performing at SXSW this summer (14^th March – Haddington’s, noon; 14^th March – Bourbon Girl/Orange Amps Stage, 3pm; 16^th March – Empire Auto Club & Control Room Patio, 3pm, all in Austin, Texas), then you should definitely listen to Cobalt and the Hired Guns.

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