Cloud Nothings

(2014, singolo – Inclusa in “Here And Nowhere Else”, Carpark, 2014)

Youth, as the poet says, "still flees away" and there's precious little we can do about it. Dylan Baldi, head and heart of Cloud Nothings, knows this well - he's built a monument to youth, to the way it slips away in that instant when you suddenly find yourself an adult without quite knowing how it happened. A monument to the ephemeral. Before him - going back in time - Kurt Cobain, Paul Westerberg and Richard Hell had already done the same. The cocky reclaiming of a deliberate loss of values, of losing everything so as not to lose anything ("Blank Generation" by the Voidoids); the proud awareness of belonging to no one but yourself and to the explosive vitality of your twenties ("Bastards Of Young" by the Replacements); adolescence as a state of the soul, as a painkiller for a blossoming youth doomed to wilt under the blows of a life that, without even warning you, will stop firing blanks ("Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana). Man's problem has never been dying - if anything, the real tragedy is growing old. Perhaps that's why the artist Allan Kaprow invented happenings, an art form meant to burn itself out in the here and now of a single moment. That moment. Climb aboard and wave goodbye to eternity: the eternal is now. Neil Young would restate the concept in 1979: "It's better to burn out than it is to rust." Well, the music of Cloud Nothings is exactly that fast burn. And precisely for this reason, it's yet another, desperate confirmation that "rock'n'roll can never die."

In an age when everything is consumed instantly without ever truly burning - from relationships engineered in a plastic surgeon's operating room to collective mourning that lasts only as long as it takes to display one's manufactured grief in a selfie - Cloud Nothings are putting back at the centre of music, and therefore of life, the need to set fire to things. To throw yourself into the flames and let yourself burn. Alive. The last fifteen years or so of rock and its surroundings have been rife with dazzling experimental languages that had precious little to say, with thrilling revivals that rarely added a single word to discourses already formulated in the past, with neologisms that may yet prove influential or, more likely, will collapse under the weight of their own gaudy muteness. The Noughties certainly taught us that one can still be intellectually brilliant, creative, even innovative in the best cases. And yet the feeling is that something is often missing: rock'n'roll's innate recklessness. The punk spirit, which spits out today what it will devour tomorrow. The cardinal sin of so many excellent bands today is wanting to enter history without having a history of their own, planning for eternity while skipping over the moment, worshipping their fathers instead of killing them and finally becoming them. "Kill Yr Idols" - not everyone gets to be as lucky as Sonic Youth. "The past can only be created, not recreated," said Allan Kaprow again. "Attack On Memory" was something along those lines. The fleeting instant that seizes your gaze and invents memory, the moment that sinks its teeth into the past while tearing the future to shreds. Henri Bergson pierced, like Saint Sebastian, by the electrified arrows of Mission Of Burma.

Its successor dares even further. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" scorched by the tragic fury of Jesus Lizard and Wipers, memory's assaults rerouted onto the present, onto life. That scaly thing that slips from your grasp just when you think you've caught it; that thing whose force we'd like to last forever, failing to notice that the eternal only happens now. Here and nowhere else. "Here And Nowhere Else", precisely. The album's title is taken from a line in "I'm Not Part Of Me", the propulsive closer of a record that - through its rhythmic drive, melodic urgency and noise ferocity - tears the psyche apart in just over half an hour. It combs through it like a ravenous wolf hunting prey more dangerous than itself, it flushes out the fear of living - the legacy of a latent adolescence that persists despite the cheap shots taken by a cynical world - arming it with shield and spear. It catapults you into the daily war, but first it drills you on the bullets you'll have to dodge and the blood you'll have to spit out. You with a sword, everyone else with machine guns. Unfair, sure, but you don't need to betray who you are to accept the duel.

Being in the world while being yourself, being others without having to be anything other than yourself; this is the ultimate meaning of "Here And Nowhere Else". "I'm Not Part Of Me" is its final destination. Before the attack, the guitar hesitates for a second, stumbles. That second, in life, can sometimes be fatal. It marks the gap between wanting and having to, the difference between making a choice and having no choice at all. If you don't have enough cold blood and confidence, you risk screwing up your whole existence, wasting your talent chasing after something that isn't yours. But Dylan Baldi has balls. He knows what he wants, unleashes a mighty riff and pins experience and destiny against the wall: I'm in charge here, folks. The drums come crashing in like trains, their overwhelming drive is the chance for a turning point, the last train - always the same one, your whole life - that you have to catch on the fly. There it is, the moment. You feel it inside. Now or never: “It starts right now, there’s a way I was before/ But I can’t recall how I was those days anymore/ I’m learning how to be here and nowhere else/ How to focus on what I can do myself”.

It's a liberation, a solitary tumult. The awareness of one's own actions, the courage of one's own emotions. It's not easy, but afterwards you feel good. "I feel fine" screams Baldi, unrestrained. The bridge arrives, leading into the chorus. Guitars, bass and drums pack up the regrets that bind memories, the plans that collapsed on the illusions holding them up, the desires suffocated in the sultry heat of a vain wait, and ship it all off to be pulped: “Leave it all to memory of/ What we did when were young and/ Now you could just leave me on my own”. 

Now you know what you need. "You are not what I really needed." You didn't understand it; you saw it, you sensed it. You're not part of yourself, and once you realize that, you convince yourself it's already too late. "I'm Not Part Of Me" says exactly the opposite: the train has gone, ok, but you can always get there on foot. It's never too late to be now anyway.

This is the here and now sung by Cloud Nothings, a band that – just like Japandroids and Fucked Up – is staking a claim as the last bastion of rock immediacy. A clear demonstration that even in genres where nothing new can seemingly be said anymore, it can still be said as if for the first time: distorted guitars, pounding drums and epic melodies screamed until the throat bleeds. It looks easy, but affectation lurks just around the corner if you're not guided by the same reckless spirit that drove the Ramones and Husker Du. As long as that spirit lives on, there will always be a "I'm Not Part Of Me" to set our souls on fire.