'Monsters' fits right in with Cohen and Ghost

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music writer
• Published: Nov 13, 2009

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Monsters, the second CD from Baton Rouge band Cohen and the Ghost, contains doomy but playful songs, inventive melodies and shifting tempos. The baritone voice out front belongs to 20-year-old singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cohen Hartman.

A songwriter since he was 14, Hartman recorded six solo albums before forming Cohen and the Ghost in 2007. Besides writing songs in his teens, Hartman learned to operate a recording studio by spending weekends at his grandfather’s Tru-Hart Studio in Lockport. He got lots of performance experience, too, playing bass for his grandfather’s Lafourche Cajun Band.

Working with a Cajun band was fun, Hartman said, but his taste runs more to the atmospheric songwriting of Tom Waits and epic Canadian indie-rockers Arcade Fire.

When Hartman decided to form a band, he, like Arcade Fire, chose to work with an abundance of instruments. Cohen and the Ghost has had as many as 10 members. The current lineup features six musicians, four of whom play multiple instruments, everything from conventional guitar, bass and drums to banjo, lap steep, vibraphone, marimba and glockenspiel.

Beyond the many instruments, Cohen and the Ghost music is defined by dynamics, an ancient but effective composition technique that consists of loud and soft contrast, crescendos and decrescendos.  

“We have kind of oceanic waves in our sound,” Hartman said. “A song should be like a good movie or a good book, with ups and downs and a climax. That’s always been how I write my music.”

The dark, cinematic sound of Cohen and the Ghost made the band a natural choice to perform music for the silent films shown on the Baton Rouge Gallery lawn. The group most recently played for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on Halloween night.

Audiences who’ve seen Cohen and the Ghost in the past year will hear the heavy sounds and angry lyrics the band performed on stage in the group’s new CD, Monsters. A year in the making, Monsters lives up its name with the gloomy “Like A Curse,” moody-jazzy “Fallen Angel” and, a song suitable for the soundtrack of a Munsters remake, “Red Rabbit.”

Hartman’s father, an amateur songwriter, named him after Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. 

“He was a music elitist,” Hartman said of the late Dwayne Hartman. “I am, too. My father raised me to think that way. When I was growing up, if I was listening to a pop record like Aqua or Eiffel 65, my father literally took the albums away from me and threw the Pixies in my face or Sgt. Pepper or Pink Floyd’s Wish You Here. He’d say, ‘See what you get out of this.’ I owe everything about my musical style to my father.”

In addition to performing and recording with Cohen and the Ghost, Hartman and bassist Derek Arbour recently created Phantom Party Records. Monsters is the label’s first release. Phantom Party’s five other acts include The Mysterious Stranger, which is opening for Cohen and the Ghost’s record-release show tonight at the Spanish Moon. Prom Date, another Phantom Party band, recently won LSU’s battle of the bands.

Hartman expects more releases from the Phantom Party roster in the next several months. His vision for Cohen and the Ghost, Phantom Party Records and a creative community based around the label prompted him to drop out of LSU 18 months ago.

“I didn’t feel like I was there for anything that I loved,” he explained. “But I have such a passion for music. I woke up one morning and felt like this is exactly what I had to do. I couldn’t hold this back any longer. My family still gets on me about it every day but I’m glad I made the decision. I’ve come a long way.”