Music
Review: Cloud Nothings’s The Shadow I Remember Offers Covid-Era Catharsis
The album provides a cathartic outlet with which to confront the pains of self-definition in an ever-amorphous world.
4Cloud Nothings frontman Dylan Baldi is an aggressive proponent of self-care. “I need to make time for me,” he shout-sings amid squealing guitars and clanging drums on “Sound of Alarm” from The Shadow I Remember. The word “care,” though, might be generous, given both his rough vocal delivery and the scathing self-criticism scattered throughout the noise band’s ninth studio album. Baldi is certainly concerned with self-analysis, assessing a playback loop of memories and past actions: “Well, it’s hard for me to say/Without doing it all again,” he resolves in response to his own speculations of worth on “Am I Something.” But whether his instinct is recuperation or preservation, Baldi’s lyrics reflect a struggle to escape monotony and repeat past mistakes.
The music on The Shadow I Remember echoes this predicament. The band has sharpened their tight, guitar-driven riffs, which are routinely interrupted by uneasy, wordless bridges or guitar solos. These songs downshift from major-key hooks into more discomfiting tones, from power chords into needling stray notes and abrasive feedback. Such transitions, especially unsettling on tracks like “A Longer Moon,” illustrate the idea of a sense of complacency that’s been shaken to the core. Two of the best songs on the album, the bookends “Oslo” and “The Room It Was,” focus on the need for change, of old ways of living being killed off. Slyly, they apply to both the micro, first-person experience that Baldi is sketching and the world at large, where people, in the wake of a global pandemic, are rethinking their habits and lifestyles.
While The Shadow I Remember feels almost tailor-made for our Covid-19 moment (“The world I know has gone away/An outline of my own decay,” Baldi observes on “Olso”), such grueling self-examinations have always been Cloud Nothings’s stock in trade. On their earliest albums, though, their admittedly stirring music registered as whiny complaints paired with restless grunge-pop. Here, Baldi and company have filled out their narratives of existential dread and ennui, matching thematic threads that intriguingly explore directionless confusion and coming to terms with one’s own limitations.
At first blush, the album’s least compelling moments arise when Baldi positions love as a cure-all to his thorny existential questions. “Nothing Without You” features Ohmme’s Macie Stewart affirming her devotion to her object of desire, served up with a straight-ahead, dutifully brawny instrumental that blends into similar arrangements on the album. Yet, just when you think the band is leaning too heavily on blunt proclamations, a more nuanced wrinkle emerges in the songcraft: The clever “Only Light” doubles as a what-if scenario that ponders a beloved partner never having been born, while the earnest “It’s Love” is sung with the gruffest, most strained vocalizations Baldi can muster.
Like the dribbling piano that shows up in a few places beneath all the post-hardcore ferociousness, such bluntness on The Shadow I Remember comes with undercurrents of doubt. The intensity of Cloud Nothings’s sonics—all of the wailing noises a guitar can produce as well as hard-hitting, double-time drumming—provide a cathartic outlet with which to confront the pains of self-definition and personal growth in an ever-amorphous world.
Label: Carpark Release Date: February 26, 2021 Buy: Amazon
