Whether you're among those who have put their faith the previous two album releases by Cloud, and have been eagerly expecting the band's newest collection of songs, Plays With Fire, or you are an an old soul and you have drawn close to it for its attractive sixties-like cover art and the reminiscent of The Rolling Stones album title, fear not, because this is an album which will give you plenty to hold on to.
Plays With Fire, just released via Audio Antihero, is a brief, well thought out, touching record which finds Long Island's Tyler Taormina and his friends at their finest. While it is the most concise of all three records Cloud have released this far, it also feels like the most personal, most profound and ultimately the most accomplished of them all.
A beautiful story that exposes the intimacy and intrigue the album conveys in its nine compositions, comes in the words of Tyler Taormina himself: "We all listened to this record for the first time on February 17th, 2017 in my Los Angeles apartment in the pitched black darkness, no cell phones. The music was blasting loud and there was barely enough room for everyone to sit on the floor of my living room where the cover photo was taken. Something was moving around over our heads in the darkness, it felt right, like an angel of sentimentality. When the album was coming to its close I sensed that something tremendous was ending along with it, but I had no idea as to what…"
Assessing from the couple of wonderful singles the album has brought forward so far, the colorful Wildfire and the more upbeat Two Hands Bound, one couldn't but expect an affecting full length, but Plays With Fire in all its brevity it is something more than that. It is an immersive listening experience, a record worthy returning to long after it is all new and shiny, and a piece of work which combines Cloud's fervid songwriting with the forms and the elegance of its influences in a firm and in all respects sophisticated way.
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