Hannah Cohen’s first album in six years serves as a love letter to the Catskills, where she and her partner Sam Owens moved prior to the release of “Welcome Home”. The album cover for “Earthstar Mountain” sees the singer-songwriter, donning a blue suit in the middle of an 1882 lithograph of the Catskills. “I was trying to find an image to use for the album or something close to it,” she recalled in interview. “My mom works in the book art world, the antiquarian print press, and she said, ‘You should reach out to the Institute of History and Art in Albany. I bet they’d have that in their collections.’ And of course, they did.
So we reached out to them, and they gave me permission and licensing to use the image. I just fell in love with it. To me, the record cover has these little vignettes, and I felt like those could be a song each. I think about a song being like a window into someone’s life, a little keepsake, so I felt there was some synergy there.”
Named after a beautiful but inedible mushroom near her Catskills home, Hannah Cohen’s fourth album is equally otherworldly but far more digestible. “Earthstar Mountain” draws from lush ’70s textures, from Fleetwood Mac–ish opener “Mountain” (featuring Sufjan Stevens), to a Dusty Springfield homage filtered through Minnie Riperton and Buckaroo Bonzai, to a sumptuous take on Ennio Morricone’s “Una Spiaggia” with Clairo on harmonies and clarinet. Glittery standout “Summer Sweat” hints at disco-inflected futures.
Though guests abound, this is firmly Hannah’s show, and “Earthstar Mountain” marks a new plateau.
The Fat Angel Sings 