Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory

Dylan Baldi was born in 1991, the year of "Nevermind", of "Gish", of "Ten" and of so many records steeped in those musical influences that shaped an entire generation's songwriting style. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and from his teenage years began pouring his own teen spirit into home recordings, laid down alone in his bedroom onto a hard drive, pieced together with GarageBand, the way any kid anywhere in the world might do today. The point is that Dylan had an explosive creativity, dreaming up a whole series of imaginary rock bands and neatly setting them up on MySpace, each with its own little presentation page.

One of these bands was called Cloud Nothings and, somehow, it caught the attention of Bridgetown Records, a small label that offered to release an EP, Turning On, a lo-fi college rock pastiche that boded well for the future, with a few well-aimed bursts of energy, as in the single "Hey Cool Kid". The tracks ended up in the hands of promoter Todd Patrick, who invited the author of those raw compositions to open a Brooklyn show for Woods and Real Estate. The invitation put Baldi, for the first time, in the position of having to quickly put together a band to play his own songs live. In the end everything went well, and from that moment on the young musician's fame, along with that of his newly formed backing band, grew rapidly: the guys started hitting stages across much of the United States alongside the other lo-fi offspring of the new American music scene.

A few months later, at the start of 2010, Washington-based label Carpark Records signed the still nineteen-year-old Dylan as a one-man band, reissuing the debut EP with a few extra bonus tracks, and in January 2011 releasing the first album, Cloud Nothings, produced by Chester Gwazda. Baldi was no longer bound by the limitations of makeshift instruments, but had a proper studio in which to develop ideas with a bit more comfort. Creative instinct translated into sonic and expressive substance, falling in line with the energetic indie-pop of Pains Of Being Pure At Heart ("Understand At All"), dressed up with garage grit and impulsive teenage proclamations that wink at Blink 182-style collegiate punk-pop ("Not Important", "All The Time"), shining especially where everything is boiled down to pure essence (note the scorching "Heartbeat" and "Rock", both clocking in well under two minutes).

Cloud Nothings, however, failed to live up to the expectations built up around Dylan, landing on a level no higher than the debut, as if the Cleveland musician had already burned through his best ideas the year before. It's certainly a fresh-sounding record, full of melodic sketches and scrappy punk riffs, but one where clear limitations still show through, such as the easy pathos of the misunderstood youth routine ("Nothing's Working", "You're Getting Older"), complete with disjointed melodic fragments. An immature record, even though the kid plays several of his cards well, see the sticky sway of "Forget You All The Time", which recalls certain 90s pop-rock ballads. It's still bedroom lo-fi, but the sound is starting to fill out. The real breakthrough would still have to wait a few more months...

Just one year later, on January 25, 2012, came Attack On Memory, the record that established worldwide what was by now presented as a band in every sense. The leap forward is genuinely striking, and thankfully both critics and audiences noticed: the album would radically redirect Dylan's artistic path, ending up cited pretty much everywhere as one of the finest and most important alt-rock records of the year. This time in the producer's chair sat none other than Steve Albini, news that alone was enough to draw media attention. Albini helped Baldi channel all his post-adolescent rage into these grooves, helping to build out intricate, layered scenarios that reach their peak on the two opening tracks, the best the band has ever produced: Radiohead dunked in hydrochloric acid on the astonishing crescendo of "No Future/No Past", which lays bare the author's unease right from the title, and the hallucinated post-grunge of "Wasted Days" are worth the price of admission on their own.

The tension is eased by lighter, more melodic episodes ("Fall In", "Our Plans", "Cut You", the college-punk of "Stay Useless"), but even there the guitars remain firmly in the spotlight, sketching out scenes of gripping electricity. The almost Sonic Youth-like dissonances of the instrumental "Separation" and the Nirvana-esque charge of the taut "No Sentiment" round out one of the richest track listings of 2012. The growth in Dylan's songwriting is obvious, and so is his ambition to impress, on an album loaded with references rooted both in the garage indie-rock imagery straddling the 80s and 90s (Pixies and Pavement are obvious touchpoints), in the post-hardcore urgency of early Trail Of Dead, and in the legacy of the best alternative or faux-alternative bands of the new millennium (Strokes, Japandroids). The emotional explorations (or rather, just "emo" ones) never quite shake off a certain knack for catchy songcraft, with easily digestible chord progressions that nonetheless don't fully dispel the doubts of a good portion of the audience, some of whom remain skeptical about the real quality of Baldi's songs.

It would be the blistering live shows that followed which dispelled any doubts about Cloud Nothings' real qualities, by now a quartet made up of Baldi (guitar and vocals), Joe Boyer (guitar), TJ Duke (bass) and Jayson Gerycz (drums). The band was regularly invited to play nearly all the best festivals and earned a reputation as a devastating live act.

A snapshot of their live shows was captured on Live At Grog Shop, recorded live at a venue in Cleveland on April 5 and released only on vinyl in a limited run in June 2012.

Further confirmation would arrive two years later with the hugely anticipated Here And Nowhere Else, released on April 1, 2014, again on Carpark. Without Albini's help this time, the band (now reduced to a trio following Joe Boyer's departure) sought its own path with renewed vigor, producing eight highly abrasive new songs with no let-up in momentum or pause for breath. Here And Nowhere Else is a rawer record than its predecessor, at times downright angry, and one that played a major part in getting the music press to recognize the sheer quality of Cloud Nothings' songwriting. The lo-fi noise-pop in the vein of Japandroids ("Psychic Trauma", "No Thoughts") and the post-hardcore charges descended from the best of Trail Of Dead are, less noticeably than in the past, lightened by the usual transfusions of that faux-rebellious rock so reminiscent of Strokes ("Quieter Today", "Just See Fear").

The guitar slashes out razor-sharp lines over driving, powerful rhythms, helping to build an overall neo-punk attitude convincing enough on its own terms, at least sonically ("Giving Into Seeing", the closing "I'm Not Part Of Me"), sounds that remain massive throughout yet (slyly) still manage to beg to be hummed along to. Speed, grit and power are the key ingredients of a band that was gradually becoming one of the leading outfits of the new global alt-rock order, able to cram into the seven-plus minutes of "Pattern Walks" all the best of its world: melodic hooks, post-adolescent lyrics, sturdy rhythms and crescendos that would make the finest post-rock acts envious.

In 2015 Cloud Nothings made No Life For Me together with Wavves, another project that had originally blossomed as the one-man-band of Nathan Williams. Given its length (barely twenty-one minutes) and track count (nine, though two are just brief instrumental interludes), No Life For Me might look like a transitional EP: in reality its significance runs much deeper, both for the artists involved and for the musical substance, which, despite its playful intentions, ends up (unwittingly?) setting new benchmarks for alternative rock worldwide. From the very first notes of "How It's Gonna Go" it's clear just how much fun the guys had making this record: it's the triumph of two American nerds elevated to absolute reference points for the entire scene, with their Sonic Youth t-shirts firmly on their backs, by now practically transformed into an indelible tattoo.

Jangly guitar lines and catchy choruses pleasantly take turns, pleasing dissonances and assorted carefree moments chase each other throughout; listen to "Come Down" and you'll get the perfect synthesis of all these ingredients. Then pay attention to the cruising speed of "Hard Too Find": we're barely halfway through the tracklist and the record has already more than won us over; the pivot point "Untitled II" ferries things into the second half of the album, but it's the first ten minutes that lay down the blueprint for an alt-pop-rock aesthetic updated for the 2010s. "Nervous", the title track, "Such A Drug" and the closing "Nothing Hurts", a track built on nothing but electric guitars and voices, are the successful proof that what we've heard so far was no fluke. Inside No Life For Me lies not just a dynamic evolution that files down the melancholic/claustrophobic rough edges of the post-hardcore signed by Cloud Nothings, but also one that amplifies the punk-pop spirit rooted in Wavves, giving rise to a sensational synthesis, a sort of update of college rock for a new generation.

On January 27, 2017 came Life Without Sound, Album of the Month on OndaRock, a work that shows many of the band's rough edges smoothed out. The shared project with Wavves likely helped inject into the band's DNA that punk/pop spirit which files down much of the claustrophobic melancholy of the past, often steering the songwriting toward a "sunnier" disposition, eloquently expressed on the energetic "Things Are Right With You", "Internal World" and "Sight Unseen", personal updates of 90s college-rock for a new generation's use. From the sonic bouquet born in Dylan's bedroom this time also come the proto-punk "Darkened Rings", the half-lo-fi ballad done in perfect Pavement style, "Enter Entirely", and the big electric pop single "Modern Act", which opens with a kind of homage to The Cure's "In Between Days".

But the wonders that elevate Life Without Sound to such heights, while still keeping it tethered by a strong fil rouge to the band's previous records, sit at the two opposite ends of the album: there's light in the sumptuous epic sweep of the essential "Up To The Surface", an instant classic to play for anyone you want to show the current state of the art of the indie-rock scene, and there's darkness in the obsessive tension of "Realize My Fate", which turns first into despair and then into sonic apocalypse in the dense, unmissable finale. Life Without Sound is a record that runs a serious risk of pleasing just about everyone, with those electrified melodies torn open by sudden bursts of rage that saturate the atmosphere. An architecture perfectly sublimated in the three and a half minutes of "Strange Year", another compositional peak of the record, where decisive wave and post-hardcore influences also converge.

Cloud Nothings don't stop: 2018 brings another release from the band too: Last Building Burning comes out on October 19. Eight tracks, packed into just over half an hour, kicked off by the brutal "On An Edge", a devastating slab of hardcore-punk played as if the band had decided to smash itself to pieces at full speed against a wall. So begins an album steeped in teenage angst, produced by a band in a state of grace, even more direct than in the past, at times downright ferocious, mean, unhinged compared to the less uncompromising "Life Without Sound". But as on every Cloud Nothings record, the two souls of the Cleveland band once again coexist in perfect harmony: the more outrageously noisy one ("In Shame" belongs to this group) and the one chasing a friendly hook, as heard in the scraps of battered melody poured into the narcotic neuroses of "So Right So Clean" and the fast indie curves of "Another Way Of Life", gulps of oxygen after a long breathless sprint. Despite the overpowering electric chaos that defines Baldi's songwriting, for every "On An Edge" there will always be a "Leave Him Now" and an "Offer An End" that - while barrelling along like trains - veer sideways, toward the catchier side, to balance out the more borderline, nihilistic aspects.

Everything works wonderfully, short tracks, no frills, with one welcome exception, the eleven minutes of "Dissolution", which take Cloud Nothings elsewhere, into a further dimension, hitherto unexplored, with a long instrumental interlude steeped in feedback and improvisation, which in a live setting becomes sheer sonic wreckage, and from the eight-minute mark onward it feels like being inside an "Art Of Almost" amplified to the nth degree. "The Echo Of the World" is the perfect post-hardcore instant classic: a sprinting start, an apparent lull in the middle, a subsequent crescendo and a desperate closing howled at the world, that "You'll never take it back" that drags us forcibly into the abyss of despair, spewing over us years of youthful listening never forgotten. But it's the whole of Last Building Burning that holds so much overflowing energy it can barely be contained. Energy that will keep radiating until even the last building has caught fire, as prophetically announced by the title. For several years now, Cloud Nothings haven't just managed to avoid writing a bad record - it seems almost impossible for them to drop below a level of excellence. A textbook case we're thrilled to experience (and share) live. New benchmarks for the years to come.

In the first months of 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic explodes across the world, and even though the American lockdown was never as restrictive as the one imposed here, Dylan Baldi and drummer Jayson Gerycz, unable for an indefinite period to undertake any live activity, seize the opportunity to start working remotely on new compositions, trading files on which each of them records their parts in turn. This is how the ten tracks (nine sung plus the instrumental "Tall Gray Structure") that make up The Black Hole Understands come to light, released in early July 2020, in which everything goes back to being rooted in that simplicity that must have brought Baldi back to the days when he recorded his first experiments as a one man band in his bedroom. The final result has an indie-pop roundness that, while always present in Cloud Nothings' writing, hadn't emerged this prominently in a long time. The brilliant hooks of "A Silent Reaction" and "Memory Of Regret" (which in a perfect world would climb straight to the top of the charts) are a shining example of this, but throughout the album it's hard to find those uncompromising, knife-edge assaults that only a few years earlier had been the building blocks of entire albums.

Thanks to its own intrinsic qualities, The Black Hole Understands could well succeed in winning over new listeners, without containing any musical mortal sin that might alienate the band's now well-established fanbase. And while a few songs ("A Weird Interaction", "Right On The Edge") end up sounding harmless, almost toothless, Baldi almost always tries to slip in dissonant elements to liven things up, as in the sonic finale designed to revive the otherwise anemic "An Average World", or in the nineties alt-rock flare-ups found in "The Sound Of Everyone" or "The Mess Is Permanent". With every trace of post-hardcore dissolved, The Black Hole Understands will be remembered as Cloud Nothings' "alt-pop" record, the one through which Baldi forcefully sought out sunlight during the dark days of the pandemic, even going so far as to build Sixties-influenced jingle jangle ("Story Thay I Live"). A self-produced album with no involvement from labels or distribution channels, released in a way that bucks current music-industry trends: the songs, at least initially, weren't released on the most widely used streaming platforms, but exclusively on the band's Bandcamp page, as a way of self-funding after lockdown.

But the difficult year of 2020 also saw Dylan Baldi bring to life a new project, stylistically very far removed from Cloud Nothings, called Baldi/Gerycz Duo. Two experimental jazz records, the first released in March on Carpark, Blessed Repair, the second at the end of October on American Dreams, After Commodore Perry Service Plaza. Sprawling tracks, entirely instrumental, deeply avant-garde, assembled with no concern whatsoever for any commercial implications. Dylan leaves his guitar in its case and picks up the saxophone, not always in a conventional way, while Jayson Gerycz (part of Cloud Nothings' core lineup ever since they stopped being a one man band) handles drums, percussion and assorted noise.

Dylan in Philadelphia, Jayson in Cleveland, locked down in quarantine but launched into adventurous free sessions that - as Baldi himself explains - the two of them actually tend to do fairly often anyway, to break up the record-tour-record-tour routine of their main band. Serene and meditative for long stretches, the three tracks ripple and in places turn into a rather "avant" affair, one that risks raising eyebrows both among purists (woe betide anyone passing themselves off as a jazz musician in times like these, packed with so many outstanding releases) and among Cloud Nothings' own fans, likely thrown off and not particularly inclined to follow Baldi down these unexpected arty detours. It's likely that many will still prefer his post-hardcore side, or perhaps the alt-pop one flaunted on the recent "The Black Hole Understands".

At the end of February 2021 it's time for The Shadow I Remember, for which Steve Albini returns to the production chair. Microphones in place, and with the "Rec" button pressed, this time eleven songs emerge from Electrical Audio Studios that smooth out the youthful rage that had still come through so strongly up to "Last Building Burning". Cloud Nothings' entire career has been marked by an (involuntary?) alternation between electrically very jagged records and softer ones, in which the indie-rock component becomes dominant, sanding down many of the rough edges. The Shadow I Remember sits roughly halfway between the two, ranging from the scorching post-hardcore of "It's Love", to the punk flare-ups of "The Spirit Of", from the post-grunge of the excellent "Am I Something" to the more harmonious, but also more by-the-numbers, guitar-indie of "Nara".

Shining particularly brightly are the tracks with strong distinctive traits: that's the case with "Oslo", which starts out subdued before rippling into an elaborate crescendo, and with "A Longer Moon", enriched by interesting guitar interplay. Drummer Jayson Gerycz's work continues to stand out more and more, while a pleasant touch of variety comes from the voice of Macie Stewart of Ohmme in the melodic hooks crafted for "Nothing Without You", which nonetheless remains too similar to other songs the American quartet had already recorded in the past. Perceived and interpretable as a transitional work, The Shadow I Remember nonetheless confirms the high compositional quality of the Baldi & Co. firm, a guaranteed-origin brand that keeps delivering excellent standards, even though it can no longer rely on any element of surprise.

It takes three years for the follow-up to land in our hands, Final Summer, preceded by four singles and released in April 2024, a record that shows the intention - even more than in the past - to mediate between rawness and harmony. The unexpected interlude, vaguely kraut in feel, serves as the opening for a title track that's exciting above all for the effect produced by its intriguing bass counterpoints. Baldi throws himself into the scene singing a melodic verse, followed by a radiant chorus.

Even though the following "Daggers Of Light" doesn't skimp on noisy flourishes, it's clear that the band's goal is aimed at crafting a more engaging alt-rock, as shown by the serene instrumental coda of "Mouse Policy". And while on "Running Through The Campus" Cloud Nothings reach for "classic" horizons, on "Thank Me For Playing" they go about adding some complications, on "On The Chain" they keep having fun with dissonance, and with the powerful "I'd Get Along" they go back to shaking things up as in their most jagged moments.

Contributions by Lorenzo Righetto ("Cloud Nothings") and Silvio Pizzica ("Here And Nowhere Else")

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