Synesthesia

Purple Haze, Philip Cunningham

Lila Blue - The Late Cord
Blue isn't quite right. If ever a song was a color, it's "Lila Blue" and Lila is purple. Purple in its velvet organ, bruised sound samples, in the voices reaching to part the instrumental haze, dying men grabbing for air. The new EP (US, UK) from The Late Cord--a collaboration between Texas iconoclasts Micah P. Hinson and John Mark Lapham--is all cusp of netherworld.

When I Come Around - The Coctails
Every review of the The Coctails final, self-titled album (US, UK), refers to it as "autumnal." Every one! Autumnal, of course, is code for mature and melancholy. It also says resigned, and, when the intent is derogatory: worn, tired, on its last legs. So yes, this, the record's lead track, is brown, occasionally leaching to sepia; a photograph of 2 a.m. in an empty bar. Diffident guitars call half-heartedly to one another, a clarinet paces in the shadows. But then something happens at 2:11, a rose-tinted falsetto rises, "I come out of the night/ I come into the light." A canary in the coalmine, singing pink.