About a year ago, it seemed easy to predict what Dylan Baldi's first great album would probably sound like. After the release of the Turning On, a self-recorded collection of CD-Rs filled with tuneful alt-punk songs wrapped in tinfoil and steel wool that was released by the tiny California imprint Bridgetown Records, Cloud Nothings' self-titled debut on Carpark was an identifiable point on a familiar trajectory. The clarity afforded even by its modest budget made sweet and airy singles like "Forget You All the Time" and "Should Have" sound revelatory, while more overtly aggro tracks like "Rock" and "Not Important" felt thin and regressive, unnecessary vestiges of lo-fi provocation that didn't do Baldi many favors.
And then "No Future/No Past" arrived as the first single from Attack on Memory. It was brightly produced but tonally dark with a queasy anti-melody-- a confrontational act that suggested that Baldi was going off script. Turns out "No Future/No Past" is the least representative track on Attack on Memory, but it opens the album with a necessary slate-clearing. While a full record of fizzy pop-punk would've been welcome, Cloud Nothings are trying for more. As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.
The overhaul is radical: It's literally a different band from the one that made Cloud Nothings. For one thing, Cloud Nothings is actually a band now rather than Baldi's solo project, retaining the lineup that toured with Fucked Up and likely learned a lot from them. While the freedom and ease of being a bedroom artist has its advantages, you can't make your own Sunny Day Real Estate and Wipers records without a beastly rhythm section. Even beyond the short window of time that passed between Cloud Nothings and Attack on Memory, this is a record that crackles with "let's get this on tape now" immediacy-- eight tracks, about half an hour, blunt lyrics, big choruses, lots of screaming. Fussing over these songs would've sapped their urgency.
"No Future/No Past" is the first gauntlet Baldi throws down but it's not the most daunting. At more than nine minutes, "Wasted Days" is far longer than anything on Cloud Nothings. As a radio edit, it could be something like Cloud Nothings' answer to Foo Fighters' "Everlong", a fanged beauty of barbed chords, torrential drum rolls, and impassioned emoting. But as it rolls on, "Wasted Days" becomes simultaneously forbidding, disorienting, and psychedelic, something like a black-and-grey kaleidoscope. As the band hurtles to the finish, Baldi repeatedly yells, "I thought! I would! Be more! Than this!" in a high-voltage scree as a painful paradox after such an ambitious display of more.
Baldi has always been a hooks guy*,* and Attack is every bit as catchy as the more rigid and user-friendly Cloud Nothings, and the spaciousness of Steve Albini's recording gives plenty of room for these hooks to careen into each other: "Stay Useless" is an anthemic tantrum that shifts rhythm without warning, the bludgeoning riffs of "No Sentiment" give way to the plaintive vocals and jittery snare runs on "Our Plans", while "Cut You" fades out the record on a gracefully arcing chant that's equally vengeful, self-loathing, and hopeful.
There's the temptation to give too much of the credit to Albini, whose open-door policy has attracted an endless number of cred-deficient bands. Attack on Memory is unmistakably his work-- Baldi's vocals are close-mic'd and raw, the drums are loud as hell, the guitars are economically panned and almost entirely free of effects processing, and there's actual space in between of all of them. But here's Baldi explaining Albini's role to Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly: "Steve Albini played Scrabble on Facebook almost the entire time [we were recording]. I don't even know if he remembers what our album sounds like." It was meant as a compliment, but the lesson is clear: A lot of producers would be better off stepping back and doing nothing. Attack on Memory isn't what typically gets classified as a "headphones record," but that's the best way to first experience how alive it sounds, aggressively leaping out at you with real dynamics. Check the giddy explosions out of the pockets of silence punctuating "Stay Useless", the offbeat harmonies and rhythmic stumble that sound like happy accidents on "Fall In", or Baldi's serrated bark shredding the uneasy full-band détente following the solo of "No Sentiment".
That's where you'll find Attack on Memory's key lyric, "No nostalgia and no sentiment/ We're over it now and we were over it then," making the title's implications clear: If you enjoy this as a work of art, there's an invitation to adopt it as cultural critique. Baldi shares stages and a label with Toro Y Moi and joked about "Forget You All the Time" being "our most chillwave song" at a Los Angeles show, so the title is more of a call to be heard in the current climate rather than a total negation of it. But the last Fugazi album came out when Baldi was 10, and it's easy to see "memory" as a stand-in for indie's stylistic pervasiveness: de-emphasis of guitars and live performance, passivity over aggression, past over presence, singing like you don't care if you get understood or even heard. That just doesn't cut it for a lot of people his age who wonder if they'll ever witness "The Argument"'s kind of life-affirming vitality firsthand.
There's a fundamental irony in how a record titled Attack on Memory is such a sonic throwback, while Baldi's lyrics obsess over arrested development and missed opportunities. But like the best of indie's recent guitar bands that dare to skew retro-- Yuck, the Men, WU LYF, to name a few-- Attack on Memory is too visceral to feel like escapism, too vital to feel like cheap revival. Not when this sound's death was the wrongful diagnosis of trendwatchers: Those of us who grew up on Drive Like Jehu, Braid, and Jawbreaker can listen to Attack on Memory and sense their artistic legacy is in good hands, but there will inevitably be teenagers for whom Attack on Memory stands to be that kind of record to call their own. And hopefully we'll all meet up in the mosh pit.
