Yellowbirds is the new solo project of Sam Cohen of the Boston band Apollo Sunshine, who were responsible for a couple of the best rock records and best rock shows I've experienced in the past decade. A lot of my love for that band was due to Cohen's jaw-dropping guitar playing, but he only ever sang lead on a handful of hit-and-miss songs in the Apollo Sunshine catalog, so I wasn't sure how excited to be about him taking the lead on the Yellowbirds' recent debut album, The Color.

Cohen's voice and songwriting are a little more confident and developed on the Yellowbirds material than on his band's previous albums, but the sleepy, pastoral aesthetic and the album's emphasis on texture and ornate production over hooks and personality unfortunately echoes Apollo Sunshine's heartbreakingly underwhelming 2008 album Shall Noise Upon. Still, the densely detailed psychedelia of The Color, as much as it's not necessarily what I'd like to hear from Cohen, is pulled off really well when his guitar playing gets to shine, especially on the twangy "Rings In The Trees" and the gorgeous "Beneath The Reach Of Light," which brings out a little of the Cohen that amazed me on early Apollo Sunshine songs like "Conscious Pilot" and "Ghost."

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