The context of any record being released in 2021 is clear: you’re getting a delayed missive from the times before, a statement from inside possibly the most harrowing shared experience of all our lives, or a proposition for what could come next. Cleveland, Ohio four-piece Cloud Nothings have opted for a bit of all three, releasing an album in the middle of 2020, a dozen monthly EPs over the course of the pandemic, and most recently The Shadow I Remember – their seventh LP, and the first one they’ve been able to tour in nearly two years. That winding tour brought them to Cambridge’s Sinclair nightclub one evening, where they brought to bear all the fury expected from their brand of noise rock.
Cloud Nothings move onstage like a well-oiled machine. There’s rarely a moment of dead air from the moment they step from behind the curtain, opting to fill downtime with walls of guitar noise and drum improvisation. It’s in this way they begin their set, like watching construction workers move massive girders into the shape of a song: slow, gradual, deliberate. Frontman Dylan Baldi makes some adjustments to his guitar before anything else; bassist TJ Duke takes a moment to restring. While each is occupied, everyone else builds tension, the mark of a band that’s been playing together for more than a decade, album after album, each one knowing exactly what the others will do, wordlessly.
The sonic obelisk they build for their first song turns out to be ‘Pattern Walks’, the seven-minute centerpiece from their 2012 record, Here and Nowhere Else. It’s a statement for a band to begin the set with one of the strongest songs in their catalog, and immediately it sets the standard for the night. Baldi’s voice is raspy and fierce as he repeats the title over and over in the song’s mantric chorus, Duke and drummer Jayson Gerycz propelling the song forward with incomprehensible force while Baldi and guitarist Chris Brown create a storm of noise atop their unwavering foundation.
That intensity is characteristic of all Cloud Nothings’ songs, old and new. But while it’s easy to be swept away by the sheer power of the music, Baldi’s lyrics are just as weighty. Not untouched by their predecessors and contemporaries in the midwest emo scene, Cloud Nothings’ lyrics often touch on quandaries relating to the fleeting nature of time, like ‘Sound of Alarm’ and ‘Stay Useless’ which, recorded nine years apart, find Baldi in a similar state, needing to pause and reflect and steal away time for himself, for composure and growth.
Elsewhere he asks even bigger, ontological questions, as in the eponymous refrain of ‘Am I Something’, questioning both if he is morally good, or if even a single person even needs him. It’s one of many lines from The Shadow I Remember that can be traced back directly to the effects of the pandemic. With ‘Oslo’, Baldi asks “Am I older now / or am I just another age?” Removed from context it’s a rumination on maturity, but given the past year and a half, it’s a fair question to consider if it’s even possible to grow when nearly all facets of life ground to such a profound halt. But notably and crucially, while The Shadow I Remember is a record unmistakably marked by the pandemic, its themes, and the questions it raises reach far beyond the months everyone spent inside, and Cloud Nothings succeed in the difficult task of making an album that speaks very powerfully to a specific time without eschewing universal themes.
It’s a night of huge riffs, pounding drums, heady questions, and chant-able choruses, as Baldi will often bring a song to its peak with a repetition of a standout line or phrase. Most of the band’s songs hail from the latest record, with a few notable exceptions, including ‘So Right So Clean’, which is arguably the most unique song of the night. Where most Cloud Nothings songs pummel in varying degrees courtesy of the immense technical skill of the band’s rhythm section, ‘So Right…’ writhes instead. It moves with a patient, Gothic menace, inverting the band’s usual structures and coming back to the chorus at its calmest point rather than its most furious. Placed in the middle of the set, this stylistic shift is thrown into stark relief, and the chilling pacing of the song is all the more effective for it.
Having begun the night with one of their most titanic songs, Cloud Nothings bring the evening to a close with an even bigger bang, ‘Wasted Days’, from their most critically-lauded album, Attack on Memory. As with The Shadow I Remember, Attack on Memory was produced by Steve Albini, and in-person it’s doubly understandable why the band has teamed so often with the engineer known for the huge, punishing sound of bands like Metz and STNNNG. ‘Wasted Days’ is very much a song from the psychic brink, its two brief verses giving way to a spiraling refrain of “I thought I would be more than this”, a sentiment like a knife in the gut, and Baldi’s voice becomes increasingly guttural the more he repeats it. Towards its conclusion, the song slows down, the obelisk stripped to its component parts, almost droning, almost quiet. And suddenly at a moment’s notice, the refrain begins again, Baldi’s words melt away into unintelligible screams, the instruments ascend louder than ever before – and then it’s done, and the band waves humbly to the crowd, gives thanks, and disappears backstage.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux