Hood
Cold House

THE REVIEW

"Cold House" is about time.

And thus about numbers too, since there are always numbers when it comes to time.

The album starts and I don't notice it, the first 30 seconds don't exist, every time it plays, I only perceive it when nearly the first minute has already passed. I wonder what those initial seconds contain.

Then there always comes a memory, one of those distant ones that you can never understand if it's truly yours or the image from someone else's story.

Here it is.

My mother tells me that the old woman from the landing across is no longer there, new tenants will arrive in about a month and, as she tells me this, I think back to when I encountered the old lady during her illness, which had been yellowing her skin for years, and I said something like "you're changing, you've grown" and my mother quickly corrected me, saying that old people don't grow.

I hadn't really understood at age 6 that at some point growth stops and that changes from then on begin to be a milder form of deterioration. And I was doing the math, counting - here are the numbers that always return along with time - it had to be identifiable, geometrically recognizable, this moment when I too would stop growing and start yellowing.

The Hood talk to me about this. Sometimes I find the freezing of that moment I was looking for as a child. It's the cold electronics together with the warm whisper of the throat, it's the mood traces drawn in pastel that have stopped and finally made it observable. Tracks like "You Show No Emotion At All", "Lines Low To Frozen Ground" tell me these stories.

"Cold House" has taught me not to worry about the consistency of our transformations.