LP
Carpark Records (2023) US
On their third full-length Here and Nowhere Else, Cleveland-bred outfit Cloud Nothings give joy a hard, sharp edge. Utilizing every possible opportunity to write while on the road for 18 consecutive months following the release of 2012's Attack on Memory, Baldi presented an album's worth of new material to his bandmates with just days before they'd enter the studio with esteemed producer John Congleton. "I'm pretty sure every song was written in a different country," he says. "It's the product of only having a couple of minutes here and there." The result is Cloud Nothings, refined: impossibly melodic, white-knuckle noise-rock that shimmers with sumptuous detail, from Baldi's lone, corkscrewing guitar to his dramatically improved singing to bassist TJ Duke's piledriving bass lines and drummer Jayson Gerycz's volcanic fills. It's yet another staggering show of a progress from a songwriter and band still coming into their own.