Return to Cookie Mountain was released during my freshman year of high school. One of my new friends in that class burned me a copy to listen to and I distinctly remember the feeling I had when I first heard “I Was a Lover”. It was a feeling of wonderment, strangeness, and utter disbelief. Being only 14 I was in the early innings of experiencing avant-garde art rock, just a little babe whose musical experience was largely constrained to your typical song structures, and the strangely experimental sounds throughout that song were somewhat of a revelation for my budding little ears. Alongside Modest Mouse’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News it was one of the first albums I heard where I fully understood the concept that things could sound “shitty” while still sounding amazing at the same time, that chord structures didn’t need to have a clean resolution, and that dissonant atmospheric sounds had the power to elicit emotions in you in a way that clean and tidy progressions couldn’t. It’s no surprise of course that the legendary David Bowie was a huge fan of this band during his lifetime and actually contributed backing vocals to the song “Province” on this album.
Put another way, it was a transformative album for me in a subtle way, opening up my ear to things that they had never experienced. And for that reason this album will always be a formative one for me. I don’t turn to it often (it’s been years since I’ve listened to any song off this album besides “Wolf Like Me”) but every time I do I get those pangs of nostalgia and feelings of adventure.
Standout Songs: “Wolf Like Me”, “I Was a Lover”, “Province”, “A Method”, “Dirty Whirl”, “Tonight”
