It’s the songs. No matter how much is said about the Cleveland band’s evolution and the poetic, harmonic, and formal elements amassed and/or lost across nine albums, it is in the memorable trail of the song that their essence endures. Anthemic, lived with the heart in one’s throat and the urgency of the words that break free from there, without ever falling into populist pandering—lol, Arcade Fire—but carved for full-throated singing and a permanent place in the indie collective consciousness: ‘Wasted Days,’ ‘Modern Act,‘ ‘On an Edge,’ or, of course, ‘I’m Not Part of Me’ on a long list that the most die-hard fans will always shuffle in their memory of that moment when the world seemed full of possibilities or Dylan Baldi’s words were a reflection of that college crush. A fundamental part of a potential indie lore that could emerge anywhere and shaped the character of Superchunk, Built to Spill, or Wavves. Without dwelling on that past—which germinated in the lo-fi solitude of a bedroom on a self-titled debut album and came to life with the canonical ‘Attack on Memory’— the band led by Baldi, flanked by his longtime partner Jayson Gerycz on drums and multi-instrumentalist Chris Brown, continues to stay true to its own songwriting instincts with ‘Final Summer,’ their first album on Pure Noise after years of being on Carpark. Without straying too far from a formula laid out on the aforementioned ‘Attack on Memory’ and definitively cemented on ‘Here and Nowhere Else’—a blend of the energy of Hüsker Dü’s ‘New Day Rising’ with the pop instinct of the Replacements— with the necessary twists and turns to keep things fresh throughout a discography where the raw grit of the guitars and the driving force of the drums served a distinctly catchy sensibility, ‘Final Summer’ brightens the production and, consequently, the aura of Cloud Nothings across 10 songs that evoke the natural ease of those who have nothing left to prove. And they don’t. Let’s sing, then.
BS