Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory Review

You Mad?

Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory (Year) – 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 while each of the band's long-players have had a cohesive vision, 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. And 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 Attack on Memory to call it 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 disthymic little brother. 'Stay Useless' sounds most 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, becasue even though it's only 8 tracks long, it bears little enough of the band's early genetics, making them several steps away from what could have been a pleasant but merely there band, relegated to the home-recording ghetto, but instead it finds the band becoming, aherm... 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.