When bands have been around awhile, people tend to discuss the way age has entered their work, even if the topic doesn't quite fit. With Superchunk's 10th album, I Hate Music, a collection that focuses on the forward march of time and the pain that goes along with it, this kind of commentary is unavoidable.
The Chapel Hill quartet has been a reliable and surprisingly consistent force for almost 25 years. They formed in 1989, a little bit before "punk broke," during a time when people with their eyes on the underground and ears on college radio thought of the band's North Carolina hometown as an indie-rock Seattle. They released their ninth album Majesty Shredding in 2010 after the almost 10-year hiatus following 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, and nothing much had changed: Superchunk still delivered amped-up, pogo-inspiring power pop. They've had a formula from the beginning, but it's one that works.
Their second post-hiatus record, I Hate Music, has a strong title that carries a deeper layer of meaning with it. They've released records upon records full of unbridled joy, frontman Mac McCaughan also records solo material as Portastatic, and he and bassist Laura Ballance are still going strong with their powerhouse indie label, Merge. So, no, Superchunk don't hate music. The sentiment speaks to something you find happening when you edge closer to 40 and beyond: loved ones start dying, and something that used to seem distant starts hitting close to home. As McCaughan sings on "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo": "I hate music-- what is it worth?/ Can’t bring anyone back to this earth/ Or fill in the space between all of the notes/ But I got nothing else so I guess here we go…" It's an "I can't go on, I will go on" sort of thing, and they create one hell of a ruckus in the process of moving on.
Like post-SST and then present-day Dinosaur Jr., the pace is a little slower here, some of the guitars quieter, and the production shinier, but the upward push of McCaughan's voice and that Superchunk momentum remains. (The acoustic and synth flourishes lend it a feeling similar to the early work of the more downcast, stripped-back Portastatic.) It's more grounded and focused than Majesty, and more thoughtfully reflective. Superchunk's best songs have always been the spastic ones, but though this is their darkest album to date, they don't fall into a midtempo torpor. McCaughan's nasal yowl can't help being anthemic, whether he's calling a co-worker a slack motherfucker, asking you to punch him harder, or, as in I Hate Music's excellent opener, "Overflows", singing lines like: "Everything the dead don’t know/ Piles up like magazines and overflows/ And everything that you won’t see/ Just swirls around/ Comes down and buries me." The subject matter here stings.
I Hate Music doesn't treat loss as vague or theoretical. The album's dedicated to a close friend of McCaughan and the band, the filmmaker and artist David Doernberg, who died after a battle with cancer in March of 2012. As McCaughan wrote in a blog post around that time: "I can't possibly enumerate the ways that Dave was intertwined into the fabric of our own family and lives. Likewise I have a feeling the hole that his passing leaves is larger than we even yet know." Once you learn where the songs are coming from, the sad lyrics are sadder, the happy lyrics more wistful.
Doernberg haunts the record beautifully. McCaughan sings in the final song, "What Can We Do": "Meet you on the corner every time it snows/ I’ve got wrinkles around my eyes/ I’ll say I love you, I won’t say goodbye," while the breezy "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo" references the Skatalites founder and the joy of hearing his music in a van with friends. On another standout, "Trees of Barcelona", McCaughan shares the wonderfully rendered memories of Portastatic playing Primavera Sound in 2007, and the friends who ran through the city when that set was over. The quieter, milder "Your Theme" asks for the impossible in simple terms: "Oh what I’d do/ To waste an afternoon with you/ Eating obscure, looking at girls, shopping for jeans/ Learning how to be and not to seem/ Singing your theme."
Thoughtful, quiet moments like that work but, this being Superchunk, the uptempo tracks still hit hardest. The fantastic "FOH", for instance, is cut from the same the cloth as Superchunk's raging best, as McCaughan asks a series of questions with few answers: "Did you lose something?/ Oh, I lost something.../ Tell me, are you coming around?/ When are you coming around?" Mount Moriah's Heather McEntire lends distant backing vocals to "Breaking Down", a jaunty song about fading memory. And things get especially amped on "Staying Home", a one-minute punk song about staying home that feels like their "Screaming at a Wall".
A song that combines both approaches is the the previously mentioned slow-builder, "What Can We Do" with its "I won't say goodbye." It's an epic recounting, and a fitting end to an album about listening to the music you loved with a friend and hating that music because it won't bring him back. But all the band can do is create more music anyway, offering up songs that will inevitably soundtrack other lives and deaths, too.
