As the Cleveland band returns to Electrical Audio at full force, they retain their penchant for rueful concision and world-weary chronicles of pandemic existence.
On their seventh album, Cloud Nothings remind us that personal shit persists during a pandemic—that lockdowns give us longer periods to chew over what becomes harder to swallow. As tuneful as ever, The Shadow I Remember presents the Cleveland quartet not as fighters or complacent survivors but as chroniclers, telling fragmented stories about chronic malaise and nights as dark as northern winters.
Thanks to engineer Steve Albini and their faith in a narrowing gyre of noise, Cloud Nothings could’ve released three-quarters of The Shadow I Remember at the peak of their early-2010s ubiquity. But what began as questioning has hardened into doubt. Immune to self-pity or the cynicism that is a curdled form of sentimentality, singer-guitarist Dylan Baldi finds the world testing his patience—the mess is permanent, as a grim title on The Black Hole Remembers notes. “Does anybody living out there really need me?” he howls in “Am I Something.” Opener “Oslo” wonders, “Am I at the end/Or will there be another change?” Baldi presents these verses as questions, not wisdom. His and guitarist Chris Brown’s six-string crosstalk keeps a dialogue open; drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist T.J. Duke’s rhythms rumble and thrash, impatient and surly.
Expect no left turns on The Shadow I Remember. Seven months after Baldi and Gerycz assembled The Black Hole Understands in isolation, Cloud Nothings have regained their full line-up but retained their penchant for rueful concision. Elaborations like Last Building Burning’s 10-minute “Dissolution” or even Attack on Memory’s eight-minute “Wasted Days” are gone. Rather, like the old pros they are, Cloud Nothings fold experiments into their post-punk formalism: the looped guitar arpeggio in “A Longer Moon” may evoke similar textures in a Mission of Burma track, but it slaps like Rush’s “Spirit of Radio.” The new filigrees offer pleasures previously denied in this most ascetic of bands: When Ohmme’s Macie Stewart sings the second half of the chorus of “Nothing Without You,” you can practically see Baldi’s shit-eating grin, a levity he and Brown swiftly dispel with a series of pulverizing riffs.
But every time I play The Shadow I Remember I return to “Sound of Alarm.” Propelled by a nagging, needling fuzz hook, it centers on the declaration, “I need to make time for me.” Gerycz’s thunderous interjection breaks the line into discrete Hemingway-esque halves; Baldi pauses as if to get out of the way. When work and leisure dissolve into empty space, it’s easy to imagine Cloud Nothings anticipating our anxiety with something like 2012’s on-the-nose “No Future/No Past.” But The Shadow I Remember understands the thrill, too.
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