Review:

on 2012-04-12 CharlesMartel Said:

Dylan Baldi, the singer-songwriter behind the Cloud Nothings project, has always struck me as the archetypal teenage loner. Sitting at home, in his bedroom, ignoring his mother's cries for him to come down to dinner, he noodles away on guitar pushing the sound through electronic contraptions of his own making to get just the right amount of distortion in just the right places. Not for Dylan is the lure of the mosh pit  he is content to make the sound, rather than revel in it, in the privacy of his own head.

It should hardly come as a surprise then that the music which emerges from this background should introspective, self-obsessed, lonely and simmering with an anger at the world which ignores him. I can imagine that, if something were to make him snap, give him a psychotic episode, he would calmly walk down to his school with a semi-automatic in his rucksack and open fire on those whom he felt had wronged him.

Given this impression, it may come as a surprise to discover that I actually quite like this. There may be several reasons for this. The first is that Baldi has finally decided he cannot do all of this on his own. Whether he wants it or not, he has to have help. And that has turned out for the better for the additional members bring their own energy to the project and make it all the better for it. Second, and perhaps most important, Baldi has largely given up the snappy lo-fi pop punk type of sound which characterised his earlier efforts. Thirdly, Steve Albini has produced this and, for once, has not turned it into an obscene noise fest.

The result is songs you can listen to. Better than that, it is a kick up the backside for the indie scene which for too long seems to have rewarded those bands who can go as long as possible without actually creating a melody. And "Attack on Memory" is full of melodies. The album opener, "No Future/No Past", has a melody that will haunt you for days, growing in intensity until it attempts to drown you in its density. That is followed up by "Wasted Days" which is a three and a half minute songs with an instrumental attachment which holds you spellbound for the entire six and a bit minutes of its existence.

But there is more to come. "Stay Useless" is one of those songs which you just know is going to become an anthemic favourite for the bands fans, a thundering work of guiltlessness and frustration at the expectation placed upon young people by well-meaning by misguided parents who seem to have forgotten that they too were once teenagers. "Fall In" is one of those songs which should, in an ideal world, be a pop triumph, but if it ever got radio airplay in the UK it would almost certainly be the consequence of a mislabeling of the song by a radio hack. Admittedly, the album misses out on true greatness because it is a personal album to the bedroom-dwelling Baldi and does not reach out to you as it ought, but passively waits for you to come to it.

It is rather difficult to place this album. It certainly has that quality which ought to mark it out as one of the better releases of the year. But it is hard to see who exactly is going to identify with it. It is almost as if emo kids would love this, if they were able to get past the posing that almost inevitably seems to go with emo-culture. It could perhaps start a new movement, rather like grunge did, but I suspect the teenage music world is too fragmented to achieve that. In reality, it may well pass into oblivion to be rediscovered three decades hence as a lost great , just as the Chameleons and the Sound are being rediscovered now.
Rating: 8/10