BOB MOULD + SUGAR

HARD CANDY

Bob Mould finds bittersweet release in big melodies and blustery guitars

By: MATT ASHARE |  

Published: September 5, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/sep/11

COPPER ALLOY: Mould returns to his Sugar-y ways.

With fall approaching and school back in session, it appears we're in for yet another round of tweeny-bopper mania. At the end of the month, YouTube heartthrob Justin Beiber is set to kick off an elaborate, six month-long world tour in support of his second album, Believe, which spent the summer slowly building up to platinum sales as the now 18-year-old singer attempted to do a little growing up in public. And the X-Factor screen-tested fab five One Direction, a Simon Cowell-bred, boy-band phenom who released the only debut album by a British group to hit the number one spot on American charts in its first week back in November of last year, are already gearing up for another round of global dominance: their sophomore disc, Take Me Home is scheduled to arrive this coming November. Cue media storm.

       Meanwhile, in a far off corner of the musical galaxy, a 51-year-old underground legend has spent the last year quietly building up to the big bang that is Silver Age, the roaring, melodic, emotionally wrought new solo album by Bob Mould. If Mould's name rings a bell, it could be for any number of reasons. In the 1980s, he was one of the principals in Hüsker Dü, the Minneapolis trio who emerged at the forefront of the American post-hardcore scene that laid the foundation for the alternative ‘90s, and scored a deal with Warner Bros. before flaming out. Mould's first go at a solo career may have garnered plenty of critical kudos, but it didn't quite pan out commercially. You might argue that his brand of emo-instrospection and rage-fueled metallic guitar outbursts, chronicled respectively on 1989's reflective Workbook and 1990's crushingly dark Black Sheets of Rain, was a few years ahead of its time on the angst continuum. But he finally managed to briefly capture the zeitgeist with Sugar, a short-lived power trio who got Mould's balance of muscle and melody just right on a pair of discs, 1992's Copper Blue and 1994's wryly titled File Under: Easy Listening.

       Both of those albums were recently brought back into print as multi-disc deluxe reissues, replete with b-sides, rarities, and plenty of live extras, by Mould's new label, the North Carolina-based indie Merge Records. And, having guested on last year's Foo Fighters album Wasting Light, Mould spent the summer on the road performing Copper Blue in its entirety with his new backing band, Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster and Verbow bassist Jason Narducy. Several of those dates found Mould opening for Foo Fighters and palling around with Dave Grohl, who added his voice and guitar to a couple of Sugar classics, video of which has already found its way onto YouTube. That capped off a year which also saw the publication of See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, a Mould memoir co-authored with Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad.

       If those developments haven't exactly put Mould fully in the spotlight, they've at least raised his profile to a level he hasn't enjoyed since, well, maybe never. And, in part, they seem to have put the notoriously moody Mould in the right frame of mind to deliver what likely ranks as his best album in two decades. If nothing else, after a dozen years spent messing around with electronic dance music as he slowly worked his way back to the guitar, Silver Age is surely Mould's most potent distillation of the kind of bittersweet hard-rock candy he first developed a taste for in Hüsker Dü.

     

Bob Mould, Silver Age (Merge)

The disc opens with "Star Machine," a tune that might best be described as a timely cautionary tale about celebrity culture in the era of reality tv aimed squarely at aspiring rockers. Against a brightly syncopated riff that belies the foreboding tenor of the lyrics (a Mould specialty), he sings, with a slight sneer, "You told the world you had to fire the band/Your little world has gotten out of hand," before pouring on the powerchords as Wurster hammers away at his kit. With barely a pause between tracks, the trio then launches into the disc's title track, a defiant rocker that rests on yet another extra-large riff and deals head-on with Mould's rediscovered determination to rock. "I'm never too old to contain my rage," he affirms, as if that weren't already apparent.

       Upbeat has never been Mould's favored mode. Indeed, some of his most riveting work — the stormy Black Sheets of Rain and the even more unrelenting Sugar EP Beaster, which is included on the Copper Blue reissue — have been beyond bleak. But, at his best, with a song like the Hüsker Dü underground hit "I Apologize," he finds a kind of transcendence through the raw release of mixed emotions. He rediscovers that bittersweet spot on Silver Age, particularly in the aptly named "The Descent." It begins harmlessly enough, with a pleasantly poppy chord progression that, in another songwriter's hands, could easily underpin a boy-band rocker. "Started out so starry eyed/Full of hope and wonder," he reveals ominously. Soon enough, he's confronting inner demons ("All the things I cannot change") and personal defeat ("My descent has begun/All the music left undone"), and asking "Can I make it up to you somehow?" It's an open-ended question that, for anyone who's ever been a fan of Mould, he's answered in the best possible way with Silver Age.