Birmingham, Alabama’s Terry Ohms is back with a new album almost a year to the date after his wonderfully eclectic 2019 release, Terryfirma. 2020 brings us Terry’s latest and most cohesive work yet, Cold Cold Shoulder. If you’re unfamiliar with this artist who flies just under the radar of whoever or whatever algorithm it is that makes an artist widely known these days, know that you never know what you’re gonna get from album to album or song to song. Conversely, he’s not “all over the place”, either. There runs a thread of familiar originality throughout his catalogue that somehow ties it all together as a sonically consistent and insistent omnibus that stretches back twenty years.
This time around, with Cold Cold Shoulder, Terry gives us eight stretched out, guitar-dominated tracks, with a running time of 42 minutes. Led by Mr. Ohms’ shape-shifting vocals, the songs get pushed around by soulful and sizzling guitar that is at once, tight and loose. There are keyboards from Pluto with bass lines hung over drum grooves that may cause rug burn. A Corvette station wagon of sounds smoothly swing and berate on Cold Cold Shoulder. As for the songs, Ohms offers a variety of occupants that inhabit the same spirited borough. A neighborhood where fast talk and tight two-wheel turns fall in sync with “Jam On Revenge” blasting out of the boombox on Lou Reed’s porch in Alabama.
Cold Cold Shoulder is Terry Ohms’ eighth release. Terry Ohms is the alter ego of Wes McDonald, who was the singer/guitarist for both Vulture Whale and The Ohms, and is currently the drummer for dream-psych-rock outfit, People Years. With the second full-length album in as many years, McDonald looks to be plowing
full steam ahead with this Terry Ohms alter ego. British or otherwise.
He’s been making records under one moniker or another since the year 2000. With a history of giving musical norms and predictable progressions the ol’ cold, cold shoulder, yet he still manages to deliver a damn good song, time and again. McDonald has a sharp tongue and a keen and playful musical sensibility that informs his music with
power and personality. He engineered, produced and played all the instruments on Cold Cold Shoulder at Terry’s House in Birmingham, AL. He also designed all the artwork and made all the sandwiches…
