“Sunspots”—the gentle, two-minute instrumental that opens Bob Mould’s 1989 solo debut Workbook—may be the softest, saddest “fuck you” in recorded history. Still stinging from the acrimonious breakup Hüsker Dü in 1988, the singer/guitarist formed a new trio to replace the old, this one with bassist Tony Maimone and drummer Anton Fier (who, among other accomplishments, served together briefly in Pere Ubu). That caliber of rhythm section had the potential to be at least as loud as Hüsker Dü’s. Instead, Mould turned down and turn his back on punk. “I sensed there was a part of the punk audience that would feel betrayed,” Mould writes unapologetically in his autobiography See a Little Light, “but it was important to move beyond the sound of the past eight years.” At the time, Mould was living in rural Minnesota, not far from an Amish settlement. Workbook isn’t exactly a work of entrenched technophobia—come the new millennium, Mould would even go so far as to dabble in electronica—but its hushed tone and introspective air reflects a sense of isolation that’s bucolic if not exactly idyllic.
Mould was an angry young man in Hüsker Dü, and anger abounds on Workbook (which is getting an expanded reissue in honor of its 25th anniversary, Workbook 25). Here, though, it’s dispersed among empty spaces and meandering melodies. There’s a honeycombed hollowness to tracks like “Heartbreak a Stranger” and “Sinners and Their Repentances", both of them overlaid with languid jangle and Mould’s newly naked moan. After years of straining to be heard over Hüsker’s din, he sounds almost startled by the potency and range of his own voice; the same goes for the themes of his lyrics, which don’t shy away from an encroaching spirituality that would eventuality lead to Mould’s religious awakening years later. But for every folky, free-flowing rumination is a song such as “Dreaming, I Am", which veers between a driving beat, delicate guitar, and a deceptively corrosive mood.
“See a Little Light,” the song after which Mould named his book, was Workbook’s lead single. Accordingly, it’s the album’s brimming cup of pop hooks. Still, it’s far more drifting and complex than it seems at first, pivoting around tangles of chords while gliding frictionlessly across the glassy playing of cellist Jane Scarpantoni (who’d appeared on R.E.M.’s Green and would go on to play with everyone from Nirvana to Bruce Springsteen to Swans). The widespread use of cello throughout Workbook is one of its more striking tonal choices; Mould originally wrote those parts for synthesizer, and their translation into chamber instrument threads the album with a haunting, melancholy warmth—especially on “Sinners", where Scarpantoni duels with Mould like a demonic temptation.
Hüsker Dü was, in many ways, a massively distorted folk band—but Workbook isn’t just acoustic Mould like “Too Far Down”, Candy Apple Grey with the gunk scraped off. “Brasilia Crossed with Trenton”, which Mould says came to him one morning as a “full realized dreamsong," is seven minutes of imagistic, shanty-like folk-rock, but it’s hard to imagine its soul-spilling excess and sprawl ever fitting onto a Hüsker album, even one as ambitious as Zen Arcade. The problem is, Mould takes catharsis to a new dimension on Workbook, but that leaves subtle cuts like “Brasilia” and “Lonely Afternoon” undefended by Mould’s most formidable weapon: a walloping chorus. He still wields them on “See a Little Light”—which boasts one of most searing choruses of his career—as well as on “Poison Years”, which crams tender twang, roiling angst, anthemic stamina, and squealing showmanship into a single song. All the elements of Mould’s songwriting are on parade on “Poison Years”, but they’re lumped together in odd, lopsided combinations.
“Poison Years” also shows that Mould wasn’t entirely ready to strum gentle into that good night. Along with Workbook’s darkest track, the venom-dripping “Wishing Well”, it vengefully kicks on the distortion pedal as if it were an old toy that triggered memories of a troubled childhood. The shift is more than simply sonic, as Mould himself seems equally electrified when he lets his amps to scream. One of the bonus tracks of Workbook 25 is the bouncy, catchy “All Those People Know,” the B-side of the “See a Little Light Single”—and it makes perfect sense that it was omitted from the original album release, seeing as how it could easily pass for latter-day Hüsker Dü.
The rest of Workbook 25’s bonus tracks comprise a live set recorded at the Metro in Chicago in 1989. The live version of “Sunspots” is echoing and effected, sounding in that regard almost like a John Martyn song. Mould’s affinity for vintage English folk-rock is also evident in his faithful yet fiery rendition of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out the Lights.” (He would eventually record Richard Thompson’s “Turning of the Tide” for the 1994 tribute album Beat the Retreat). But it’s “If You’re True” that’s the hidden gem of Workbook 25. A song that Mould has admitted to being a swipe at his former Hüsker Dü bandmates Grant Hart and Greg Norton—“No more friends that lie and hide / No more games to play to get to know the answer,” he rages—the Metro version of “If You’re True” is unleashed with riotous righteousness plus a clutch of country-rock licks that come together to sound uncannily like the formula Uncle Tupelo was about to make famous. It’s far more spirited than the drum-machine-backed 1988 demo version, but Mould’s grudges didn’t fully carry over to his previous group’s music. He opens those fresh wounds long to encore with three Hüsker Dü songs: “Hardly Getting Over It”, “Celebrated Summer”, and “Makes No Sense at All”. As Mould states in See a Little Light, when Workbook came out “there was a concerted effort not only to divorce myself from my past, but also not to live off of my past accomplishments”. Yet he performs his Hüsker set reverently, intimately, almost in awe of the life they’ve taken on.
While Mould seems liberated by his newfound quietude, he also strains at it. In the video for “See a Little Light” he thrashes and hammers at his strings; at one point, spit flies from his lips. It’s as though he alone can hear the noise behind his clean-toned, cello-swaddled songs, that theoretical roar that his old group would have brought to them. The pent-up force finally breaks free on Workbook’s final track, “Whichever Way the Wind Blows", a lurching, churning, borderline grungy rager full of haywire guitar and Mould’s most unhinged vocal performance since his SST days. Sure enough, Mould, Maimone, and Fier would quickly crank themselves up to paint-peeling levels on Black Sheets of Rain, their 1990 follow-up to Workbook; from there, Mould’s 90s group Sugar would return Mould triumphantly to his punchy, distorted roots. But the urgency and vigor he packs into the unplugged punk of Workbook—the frequent knuckle-scraping attack of his strumming, his refusal to whisper or withhold—are what make the album a testament to tension rather than hesitance.
