C.O.F.F.I.N's 'Out In Oslo' Is 33 Minutes of Australian Rock'n'Roll With the Dirt Left In
C.O.F.F.I.N have been a band since 2005. Out In Oslo is their sixth album and their first for p(doom), the label run by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, which means the widest audience of their career is about to meet a group that has had two decades to get good.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Declan Mehrtens — the producer behind Amyl and the Sniffers — is the reason this sounds like a room rather than a file. The Fire Note’s Thomas Wilde: Mehrtens “gives the guitars more room to erupt, which really pays off when the solos start sprawling, especially during the huge break in ‘Sleep In It’ with those woo-hoos humming underneath.”
The Spatial Dynamics: Post-Trash’s Patrick Daul wrote the definitive sentence on this mix: “everything about Out In Oslo’s production makes you feel like they’re playing your friend’s basement party that’s about to get raided. There’s no glossiness to the recording. Artificial reverb or icy synths don’t teeter beneath the surface.” Crisp enough to hear everything, loose enough to feel dangerous.
Standout Performance
Ben Portnoy, drummer and frontman at once — a rare combination. Daul notes that in punk the accent is a value-add, and “Portnoy’s unique growls and affectations put you in the room with the band.” His slow burn on “13 Days” “begins like an old sea shanty and ends like a ship’s crew is on the verge of mutiny.”
Why It’s Certified
Because bigger hooks didn’t cost them anything. The Fire Note: “Out In Oslo finds the band writing bigger hooks without giving up the dirt under their fingernails. It still rips, still gets loud, and still sounds capable of blowing a fuse, but there is more going on beneath the volume this time.”
Or, as Post-Trash put it: “It seems turning up the amps and belting out rock’n’roll rippers is a winning formula, and it’s never worked better for the band.”