If there are still a few bands who can keep selling records after the music industry's struggles with technology are all over, I hope Cloud Cult will be one. The Minnesota-based art-rockers make their recordings using geothermal energy and recycled materials, donate proceeds to environmentally friendly charities, and play concerts with an onstage painter. Their grand, unkempt indie rock is at once jam band, emo, and avant-garde. Their songs, born out of personal tragedy, are otherworldly lessons in being human.
On Cloud Cult's sixth album in seven years, The Meaning of 8, founding singer-songwriter Craig Minowa remains both tormented and inspired by the 2002 death of his infant son, Kaidin. Excess has always been part of Minowa's unique brilliance, and this album is still overstuffed with enough concepts, instrumentation, and emotional climaxes for cathartic collectives like the Arcade Fire or Danielson. At the same time, The Meaning of 8 underscores that what made previous Cloud Cult releases so powerfully affecting was not just Minowa's grief, but also his eccentricities.
Where 2004's Aurora Borealis sought to reach Minowa's son through light, and 2005's Advice for the Happy Hippopotamus by transcending flesh, The Meaning of 8 resorts to chemicals. Songwriting can be like medicine, Minowa has said, a way to deal with pain. Fittingly, free download "Take Your Medicine" showcases the band's strengths, dissolving jagged bass, violin, faraway piano, music-box lullabies, and choral chants into a bittersweet, eclectic whole. The source of Minowa's pain (and one "meaning" of the album's title) becomes apparent amid storming electric guitars on "Your 8th Birthday", as he repeatedly cries his departed son's name.
In usual form, Cloud Cult vent their sadness through songs that combine emotional release with heterogeneous arrangements, and often, head-nodding beats. The most successful tracks-- such as the soaring elegy "Dance for the Dead", with its stomping percussion and room-filling harmonies-- exhibit some of the unpretentious abandon that made earlier records so exhilarating. "A Good God" envisions Jesus as He-Man before skidding into an extended, distorted breakdown, while "Alien Christ" is a more cynical look at the supernatural. Upbeat rocker "Please Remain Calm" even shares one of Hippopotamus's themes, imagining a boy "with the helmet of an astronaut."
Sometimes, though, the songs here are glossier and more tepid than Cloud Cult's finest work. The band supposedly turned down major-label offers to go it alone for The Meaning of 8, and first YouTube video selection "Chemicals Collide" does have clean acoustic fingerpicking, tame power chords, and weepy strings that would signify affect on a Braffish TV drama. Then there's the uncharacteristic triteness of "Pretty Voice", an acoustic strummer about... missing a pretty voice. Scrubbed, as well, are Minowa's least broadly palatable eccentricities: Princess Bride sample pastiches, live audience-participation numbers, famous Neil Young quotes, cut-and-paste screeds equating President Bush with Hitler, or rhymes involving "hippopotamus." You know, the fun stuff.
I've long maintained Cloud Cult have a lot in common with the Arcade Fire. Sure, The Meaning of 8 finds Minowa & Co. again adapting the Montreal band's ardent crests and church-sized arrangements with futuristic fairy tales, hippie freakouts, and electronics. Still, Funeral didn't just blow our minds; as "Intervention" reminds us, it also codified standards for Serious, Important rock-- ones that don't necessarily capture what makes Funeral serious and important. Frivolity, in this context, is frowned upon.
Without Minowa's childlike weirdness, The Meaning of 8 has little to lighten its deathly gravity except "The Deaf Girl's Song", a sugary solo acoustic ballad about a deaf girl who writes a silent song. The last track on The Meaning of 8 is a minute-plus; no sound. How Earth-friendly is that?
