Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory Review

You Mad?

Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory (2012) – 7.6 / 10.0
Carpark Records


Dylan Baldi and his band, Cloud Nothings, are consistently inconsistent, and that's no complaint. Three albums in three years is nothing to sniff at, and each of the band's long-players have had a cohesive vision though they can be boiled down in oversimplified terms. 2010's Turning On was lo-fi, 2011's Cloud Nothings was a stab at poppy punk, and this year's Attack on Memory is, if it qualifies as a genre, angry. The new album was engineered by Steve Albini, who has, in an attempt to avoid appearing overly pretentious, dropped the title of 'producer' from his resume.

While it would be a disservice to call Attack on Memory the band's edgy record. Compared to the bedroom pop of the first and easy going, melodic love songs of the second, the album makes Baldi sound downright pissed. What it lacks in terms of emotional scope, Attack on Memory makes up for in serious rock energy, like Superchunk's dysthymic little brother. "Stay Useless" sounds like it would not be out of place on Cloud Nothings, an album, that despite my proclivity toward the poppy and syrupy, rubbed me the wrong way for the most part, as I had anticipated a second helping of the debut's GbV indebted, hook-heavy four track mini-masterpieces.

But I cannot fault Baldi for being adventurous, and if he wants to scream about injustice or getting dumped or whatever it is he's so mad about, who am I to judge when the results are as effectively corrosive as they are on Attack on Memory? It's hard to wrap my head completely around the album because even though it's only 8 tracks long, it bears little enough of the band's early genetics. In result, it makes them several steps away from what could have been a pleasant but merely there band, relegated to the home-recording ghetto. Instead it finds the band becoming, ahem...an important one. And when he screams about no nostalgia and we're over it now on "No Sentiment", I can forgive him if I think he's being a little disingenuous because he is clearly channeling Polvo and Archers of Loaf, but being sincerely insincere is allowed when you are 20ish.

Download: Cloud Nothings - Attack On Memory