Freshwater – Cold Duck Complex Presents: Bad Love

It’s more or less impossible to describe, in less than 200 words, the genealogy of Cold Duck Complex Presents: Bad Love, the debut disc from Freshwater. Luckily, the 50-plus minutes of live, melodic hip-hop on the album are easier to talk about: they’re great, and you should hear them.

Now, unless you were really into the underground hip-hop scene in Northampton, MA in the early 2000s (and who wasn’t?), you probably think Cold Duck is a cheap sparkling wine or a good indicator of migration season. However, devotees know well that Cold Duck Complex (who does the lion’s share of the playing on Bad Love) is the musical venue where emcee Platypus Complex once fired raps—equal parts existentialist heartbreak and linguistic wizardry—over instrumentals courtesy of a jazz trio who drew heavily from rock and lightly from funk.

In their heyday, Cold Duck Complex commanded a rabid cult following — volunteers crafted and swapped live recordings, and fans knew the words to songs long before they were committed to wax. The band became less active in 2005 (as bands tend to do when their members no longer live in the same city) shortly after the release of the ominously-titled EP, Enough. The band claimed, however, that they weren’t dead, only sleeping; four years later, that claim has (sort of) been justified.

Cold Duck bassist Joe Cardozo created the Freshwater mantle as a vehicle for tracks he composes and produces. Magically, he has reunited Cold Duck to perform and record Bad Love, Freshwater’s first effort.

Equal parts live favorites from Cold Duck shows and new pieces, Bad Love will please longtime fans and neophytes alike. Cardozo’s hard-rock underbelly, first showcased on Enough’s “Killing Season”, is fully realized in standout track “Lonely Animal”. Here, Platypus delivers a diatribe with the rhetorical arsenal of a speechwriter — like a Zach de la Rocha who is actually as smart as you thought ZdlR was on the first Rage Against The Machine album. “Lonely Animal” delivers more one-liners than the entire Young Jeezy oeuvre, and lowbrow existential angst doesn’t get much better than: “I feel like this life is just an ingrown hair/ a minor irritation going nowhere.”

Highlighting a different facet of the band, “Settle for More” is a multi-section jazz instrumental with tempo-shifts, time-signature changes, and catchy melodic ideas. This one will be familiar to longtime fans, who called it “Fishamajig” — but they won’t have heard it performed this tightly or at such a high production value.

Lead single “Beat Back” blends the smooth and jagged sides of the ensemble with a bold radio unfriendliness absent from most lead singles. Platypus navigates a full, ballad-influenced intro and a spacious and intense midsection equally well, elevating his intensity to levels that, live, might prove unsustainably throat-taxing. This song has little of the jazz trio feeling of early Cold Duck albums, and in fact guitars, horn lines, and choral snippets pervade the album. However, this broader palette isn’t necessarily a bad thing—Cold Duck Complex was always more The Roots than Oscar Peterson, and tracks like “The New Something” and closer “Coming Home” leverage the new musical textures to deepen the band’s mournful instrumental milieu.

Not every track is a homerun, though. Platypus is far outside his vocal depth on the song (read: no rap here) “Dog Day Requiem,” and the sorta-political “Platinum” is too unfocused to make stick its critique of America (and its musical emissary, Rap). In addition, certain fans (me!) may be heartbroken by the exclusion of tracks like “Insomniac Dreams” and “Stranger Stranger.” Still, the album is more than solid. It’s available online, but will also be available at the record release shows—perhaps the last shows of their kind, ever. Bad Love will surprise and refresh you, like a glass of Cold Duck — or perhaps more appropriately, a glass of fresh water.

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