Review Summary: On cloud nine.
Like most artists plucked from overnight obscurity and tossed into the ever-churning indie darling mill, Cloud Nothings’ sudden success a decade ago has remained their saving grace and their Achilles heel in equal measure. Breakthroughs
Attack on Memory and
Here and Nowhere Else silkily fit into the early 2010’s melodic punk zeitgeist like Cinderella’s slippers, and the Cleveland three-(and sometimes four-)piece briefly earned their place at the helm of that movement with trusty, modest, infectious batches of garage rock. It wasn’t really innovative then—prickly punk oddballs before them like Husker Du, Pixies, and The Replacements paved that path long before these guys ever sniffed a stage—but ingenuity can be overrated. Their songs banged and people loved it.
Key word: “loved.” Hipness is a hydra; committing to a reliable sound constitutes the death knell for most of the acts thrust into fame on short notice. Look no further than Cloud Nothings’ immediate predecessors (Japandroids) and successors (Beach Slang), both of whom fizzled out amidst shallower retreads of their limelight legacy. Cloud Nothings, on the other hand, frustratingly held course as stalwarts, trusting their rotation of producers to tweak their palette to each subsequent record’s strengths. Initially, this approach worked:
Life Without Sound and
Last Burning Building represented calculated, subtle steps out of stardom back into the durable indie rock underground, but the pandemic era was less beneficial to their longevity. A mellow pair of 2020 albums failed to bring anything new to the table at all, and reuniting with Steve Albini on
The Shadow I Remember felt like a desperate backbend for past glory, seemingly ignoring the underlying problem: Cloud Nothings’ devoted formula has legs, but it needs the feet of truly engaging songwriting to actually run.
Final Summer complicates the trend, then. As you’ve probably surmised nine albums deep, Cloud Nothings don’t fundamentally alter their approach here, but this is nonetheless the most energetic, revitalized, and attentive to detail they’ve sounded since the peak of their popularity. Don’t let the elongated electronic intro to “Final Summer” throw your expectations; while a welcome surprise, the bulk of this record thrives on its learned, aged resilience: the guitars chime and hack, the bass underpins each thudding groove, and Jayson Gerycz crashes the hell out of his crashes, resuscitating the band’s noisier edge while Dylan Baldi floats above the riot with tuneful earworm after earworm. Some of the cuts wield particularly barbed sentiments—“Silence” takes rhetorical blows at evangelical bigotry and “Thank Me For Playing” proves there’s anger to be explored within taking the high road—but even at his most tight-lipped (“I’d Get Along” and “The Golden Halo” are pretty repetitive) Baldi’s terse deliveries are more economical than empty-headed, far removed from the Green Days and Blink-182s of mega-commercialized punk in that they don’t have to resort to vestigial, hokey finger-pointing to achieve an earnest sense of rebelliousness. And the hooks! My word, these ten tracks and 29 minutes pack double the bang for your buck without a single dud melody or crass one-liner.
Clearly, the magic never fully left Cloud Nothings. Whether we can thank their signing to new label Pure Noise Records, their post-pandemic ability to record without remote restrictions, or their heeded worry that the knives they cherished might be getting dull,
Final Summer is more than just a lovely little dose of the same ol' well-aged, humble rock ‘n’ roll; it’s all the lessons learned along the way, contextualized as a genuinely charming return.
