On The Cool Cloud of Okayness, a folk-punk paragon rises slowly from the ashes

From its first notes to its last, The Cool Cloud of Okayness is an impressively patient album. Its songs drive slowly, powered by the ever-present engine of Tara Jane O’Neil’s towering bass guitar, with her pithy but plain-sung vocals at the wheel and an ensemble of co-conspirators along for the ride — each contributing something essential, none in a hurry to outpace the rest.

“A cool cloud of okayness covered us for a season / Then a strange wind blew a strange day,” O’Neil sings at the onset of the record’s opener and title track, accompanied by absentminded acoustic strumming and, later, Marisa Anderson’s plaintive “ghost” guitar. It’s a multilayered image: simple at face value but unfurling as the album billows with context. At a meta level, it’s an apt description of the way O’Neil operates here, cloaked in humility but miles above the mediocre.

Cool Cloud comes from the embers of tragedy. Eight months after the release of O’Neil’s self-titled 2017 LP, the Thomas Fire decimated more than 280,000 acres of southern California, including her home in the Upper Ojai Valley. In the years that followed, she took a small sabbatical from traditional song/album-craft while continuing to create prolifically, collaborating with a head-spinning number of kindred spirits and pursuing experimental, free-form projects of her own.

In 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged California in a more insidious manner, O’Neil began to work the raw material of bass sketches she’d improvised with her creative and life partner, Jmy James Kidd, into songlike shapes. She recorded these tracks over the next few years as society began its stunted recovery, with a cast of recurring characters (most notably drummer Sheridan Riley and multi-instrumentalist Walt McClements), in a studio built on the ashes of her desert home.

After its soft dawn, Cool Cloud drifts gently forward, into the tentative morning of “Seeing Glass,” through the overcast dissonance of “Two Stones,” and into the direct afternoon sun of “We Bright.” Its climax comes after its middle section, though: The glacial, gorgeous “Glass Island” is a master class in the slow burn, existing in a perpetual state of creeping tension that’s never resolved. The release comes on the next cut, “Curling,” an unrelenting groove on which O’Neil finally rises above the album’s subtle shroud and exposes the full extent of her powers.

O’Neil has been reborn several times, in several places. She cut her teeth with the short-lived but seminal post-hardcore bands Drinking Woman and Rodan in early-’90s Louisville. Ironically, though, it was in New York that she first unleashed the punk-tinged folk and country sounds at the core of The Sonora Pine, Retsin, and The Naysayers, as well as the solo work she began releasing rapidly over the following decade. Her west-coast era, beginning in Washington and including a long stay in Portland, has been no less fertile, though her major projects have arrived at a more intentional rate in recent years.

O’Neil’s travels have earned her a world-weary wisdom that’s evident across Cool Cloud. They’ve also helped her garner a seemingly infinite network of friends and collaborators, many of whom were in attendance when she performed in Brooklyn two days before the record’s release. Played live, the new songs felt lived in, as torn and treasured as a pair of well-worn jeans. “May a cool cloud of okayness rain on we,” O’Neil toasted the crowd to finish the set’s first song, wishing us safety and serenity in a world on fire.