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.

ARCHERS OF LOAF REISSUES

BAND OF OUTSIDERS

Revisiting the revamped back catalogue of ‘90s indie contenders Archers of Loaf

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

UNDERGROUND HEROES: The Archers  thrived on controlled chaos and skewed hooks .

From 1993, when they got off to a promising start with their debut album on the now defunct but then rather hip indie label Alias, until their break up just five years later, with four solid full-lengths under their collective belt, North Carolina's Archers of Loaf were more or less permanently stuck somewhere just shy of a mainstream breakthrough. A band of outsiders with indie cred and a sound that split the difference between the serrated edge of Nirvana grunge and the skewed slacker smarts of Pavement, the Archers were a perennial insiders’ favorite for most likely to succeed. . . next time. But next time never arrived, and the band quietly disbanded, leaving frontman Eric Bachmann with an intensely loyal cult following of fans more than willing to follow him onto somewhat rootsier, if no less challenging, musical terrain with his de-facto solo project Crooked Fingers, an endeavor that's proven to be a more comfortable fit for the coarse-voiced, idiosyncratic romantic than the more collaborative clamor that embodied the Archers.

       For those of us who believed in the Archers, reveled in the controlled chaos and hyperactive hooks of their best songs, and hoped in vain for the one big single that might put them over the top, it's been gratifying to see Bachmann blossom into a formidable singer-songwriter with Crooked Fingers, as he's tapped into a broader audience that encompasses a segment of the Americana crowd. And, in retrospect, the very idea of Archers of Loaf as a "mainstream" band, while amusing, now seems fairly absurd. They weren't Weezer, or even Nada Surf (for those of you who remember their short-lived tenure at the top of the pops). Neat and tidy singalong choruses just weren't an Archers’ specialty. And Bachmann was no more comfortable with tongue-in-cheek irony than he was with feigned sincerity.

       While Stephen Malkmus was happy to openly poke fun at alt-rock megastars Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in the last verse of Pavement’s classic "Range Life," Bachmann had a more nuanced take on the state of affairs in alternative nation circa ’95. "They caught and drowned the frontman/Of the world's worst rock and roll band," he hoarsely intones in the opening lines of "The Greatest of All Time," a dystopian allegory about the nature of post-Nirvana rock stardom that builds to the blustery chant, "The underground is overcrowded."

       At the time, it was one of the more keen, if subtle, observations about what transpires when it suddenly becomes fashionable to be unfashioned and a fist-pumping arena-rock band like STP feel the need to gild their bio with a story about meeting at a Black Flag show, as if they too were part of some mythically cool "underground." At least, that's how I read it. And, as a devastatingly accurate one liner, it resonates to this day.

Archers of Loaf, All the Nations Airports (Remastered) (Merge)

With Crooked Fingers, Bachmann has found a home at Merge Records, a North Carolina indie that's both big enough to reach out to his gradually growing fanbase, and homegrown enough to accommodate his musical eccentricities. Indeed, Merge probably would have been a perfect fit for the Archers back in the day. So it's no small consolation that the rights to the Archers' back catalog now rest with Merge, who just put the finishing touches on a fairly elaborate reissue campaign that includes expanded versions of all four of the band's studio albums. To mark the recent completion of the project —the revamped versions of All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes, the band's final two albums, came out last week — the Archers are even playing a few select reunion shows through the end of August.

Archers of Loaf, White Trash Heroes (Remastered) (Merge)

       In too many cases, the “deluxe,” “remastered” reissue with new liner notes and photos, and a few bonus tracks has become something of a bad joke that reeks of a last gasp attempt by the record industry to squeeze a bit more cash out of the CD market before the current business model collapses. But Merge has done a particularly admirable job of bringing back into print relevant titles by compelling artists who were never quite popular enough for a larger label to invest in. Mostly recently, along with the complete Archers of Loaf catalog, Merge has re-released crucial, formative, and otherwise unavailable material by Dinosaur Jr. and by Sugar, a trio fronted by Hüsker Dü singer/guitarist Bob Mould in the ’90s.

       It’s comforting to have these albums back in the proverbial record-store bin, if only because so much of what continues to bubble up from the overcrowded underground owes more than a little to the above-mentioned artists. (Upon hearing a 1992 Sugar single for the first time, a friend of mine remarked, somewhat incredulously, “This is exactly what Foo Fighters sound like.”) In the case of the Archers of Loaf, it’s particularly gratifying to have their albums back, complete with revamped artwork and each with a bonus CD of mostly demos and b-sides, because Bachmann has continued to grow artistically and has found a sustainable niche that continues to expand. With the benefit of hindsight, you can see how he was working toward what would become Crooked Fingers on All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes, specifically on what are essentially solo tracks like “Chumming the Ocean,” a poignant track from “Airports” where he accompanies himself on piano and sounds like he’s choking on his own voice as he spins a poetic yarn about a drowned fisherman. “The deep is in riot,” he sings, “The coastline is quiet/Asleep and divided in bands/While beer halls all revel/Drunk and disheveled/Helplessly wading/The diver is down.”

      More typical are bash-and-pop rockers like the churning “Strangled by the Stereo Wire,” the rush and churn of hammered drums and buzzing guitars offsetting Bachmann’s characteristically dark visions. And then there are those tracks, like the intriguingly melodic, cleverly titled “After the Last Laugh,” that maybe coulda been hit single material, if only Bachmann had dialed back the darkness and discord a notch or two. But then, Archers of Loaf wouldn’t have been Archers of Loaf. And that would have been a shame.