Trouble's Afoot is one of the many outlets of Queens-based musician Jordan Cooper. His LP Woke Up Dark was released in May of 2022, but it's been gestating for quite a while- longer than the band has existed, apparently. Parts of the album (the drums in particular) were recorded in 2009, close to a decade before the project's debut LP Looking For Parking (released in 2018), and the two albums draw from some of the same recordings sessions. This fact (and others, like the guitars having been recorded in a circular-shaped farmhouse, and the vocals having been captured while Jordan was suffering from a condition that caused his throat muscles to squeeze around his voice-box) give the impression that the Woke Up Dark is the product of accident as much as intention, opportunity as much as skill, and helps to qualify and contextualize the jerry-rigged bindings, anxious allure, and wishful conceptualization that holds it together. The angular and barbed bits and chips that comprise the album all feel like shards swept together from different shattered mirrors, and when you finally piece them all together, you'll be shockingly confronted with an image of yourself from different eras of your own life, somehow all fused together to reflect you, standing there, in the present. This "you," by the way, is the version of yourself listening to the record, discovering slivers of yourself shifting between the spaces of its tightly drawn chords and high-register harmonics. You, and the album, are both here, for worse and wear, and that's kind of the point. Bearing the bruises and warn edges of the long road and the many steps that it took to bring Woke Up Dark together helps to bring out the peculiar character of its songs, most of which are idiosyncratically allied with lean art punk of XTC enacted through the wistful, confessional style of the Eels. It's funny too. Funny in that undersold, wry, and irreverent manner that They Might Be Giants or Violent Femmes are lauded for, where the absurd subject matters explored (like driving one's car into a lake in a dream ["Woke Up Dark"], a father fighting with his kid over how unpopular they are at school ["The Greatest Dad In The World"], or celebrating one's own sadness and alienation ["Suck it Up"]) matched with an exaggerated and campy presentation beget a revolving carousel of unflappable existential amusements. Don't know what I mean? Well, give Woke Up Dark a spin and maybe you'll see the light.
