From the swamps of the US state, several great groups have emerged into the light of day, establishing themselves as powerhouses of doom metal and shaking up the scene with a rattling rage. Cough are one of these groups, with a heavy sound bound to make eyeballs melt.
Supporting their close friends and collaborators Windhand, Cough are en route to Australia for a mind warping tour. Because Cough work so closely with Windhand, frontman David Cisco anticipates some eventful times ahead. “We’ve never been on tour with a band so close to us,” Cisco says, “They’re [Windhand] from our hometown so I would imagine it’s going to be a little more comfortable, hopefully not too close for comfort. I’ve never really done this before so we’ll have to find out.
“We play and are labelled within the same genre, for any listener we definitely have a very unique sound compared to Windhand.”
Indeed, so close are Cough with their fellow swamp people that they even share a bassist – Parker Chandler, founding member of Cough along with Cisco, splits his time between the two bands which given the rate of success and recording activity of both over recent years would surely create confusion for the two groups.
Cisco says that’s not necessarily the case. “There’s always a bit of a juggle – Windhand has been pretty active in spurts,” says Cisco. “This last year they were quiet so we were able to get a lot done with Cough, we were able to finish up [new album] Still They Pray and get that released – there’s always a juggle with Parker being in Windhand.
“A lot of the time we find a way to keep the song writing process clean and when we’re all together we try and arrange stuff, once we have time to get all in the same room together.”
You wouldn’t have thought that naming your band Cough would generate the most brutal imagery for a metal band, so where exactly did the name come from? Laughing, and ironically, coughing to clear his throat, Cisco says, “I don’t really remember – Parker and I started this band when we were in college together – we were pretty young. I think it came out of some magazine. It was something that stuck, it embodies what we’re about it.”
Try coughing – go on, have a really good hard cough yourself – the sounds you erupt are what Cisco says typify the band’s sound. “There’s not much in the name but it speaks to the music that we write, sort of the dirge of what we create. There’s no big deeper meaning there,” he says.
Indeed, the dirge of their music causes a little animosity among Cough. Where they have been described in the press as “tortured misanthropic doom”, associates Windhand have been placed into the doom metal pigeonhole, a tag their drummer Ryan Wolfe recently said he is strongly against. Labels, as Cisco explains, are not really for Cough either. “Inserting a band into a category is extremely limiting and the individuals in this band, we come from a lot of different backgrounds we’ve grown up listening to different types of music, not just heavy metal or metal or hard rock, but even old bluegrass and country music.
“It’s very important to take elements from the culture you were raised in and the music that’s affected all parts of your life and to limit to yourself to that category, call it doom metal or whatever, it’s extremely limiting.”
By Anna Rose
