If you’ve heard any of the work that Cope has created over the past few years, you already know how quickly he can paint a masterpiece with the lightest of brushstrokes. How he captures a character in just a few words. Remember George from his self titled album, the two-bit hustler from Baltimore in “200,000 (In Counterfeit $50 Bills)?” who “spends all his dough on the horses at the Pimlico.” The amputees in Sierra Leone’s sadly named capital of Freetown in “Bullet and a Target”? The lost soul worshiping his true love in the form of a forty foot tall woman in a mural in “Pablo Picasso?” The woman who vanishes on the streets of D.C. in “Southern Avenue,” where ‘you don’t have to go overseas’ to find war, because war finds you. This is Cope’s gift: He takes snapshots of the world around him, and turns them into universal truths. He sets them to the simplest of melodies, and weds those in turn to the most soul-stirring grooves.