Search - Danny Cohen :: Shades of Dorian Gray

Danny Cohen is an iconoclastic musician, with an artistic sensibility that puts him in league with Tom Waits, Johnny Dowd, and Vic Chesnutt. Like them, he uses song forms rooted in the American folk, blues, and pop traditions, but with a fearlessly rough-hewn surface. Steeped in Hollywood lore and rife with oblique references to popular culture, Shades of Dorian Gray offers a fractured look at the underside of the American dream. Indeed, Cohen's version is staggeringly real in its bearing. As he sings in his unadorned yet plaintive manner, an insistent troubadour strums, a Gothic organ emerges from the mists, or a bowed saw quivers through the air like a drunken arrow. Cohen is no primitive striving for heights beyond his grasp--he's a careful and articulate artist luxuriating in a two-day growth of stubble on all the instruments. "Sunday in Richmond" is a case in point, sounding like Brian Wilson heard through a motel wall, then described to a messenger who ran five miles to whisper it all in Cohen's ear. --David Greenberger