Show review: Cloud Nothings at Brighton Music Hall – 3/25
Following their stellar new album and a run of exceedingly well reviewed shows at South By South West, Cloud Nothings had a lot of hype to live up to last night. I’m glad to say that they did not disappoint. Opening for them were The Dirty Dishes and A Classic Education.
Boston locals The Dirty Dishes were on first with a fantastically unique and engrossing set. Their songs exist in a realm somewhere between My Bloody Valentine-esque shoegaze, slowcore in the vein of The For Carnation or Codeine, and the rhythmic weirdness of nineties math-rock. These are all bands and genres which I greatly adore, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to favorably compare this fantastic half-hour set to any of them. The Dishes have a knack for effectively building tension with quietly beautiful instrumental passages and the ethereal voice of singer/guitarist Jenny Tuite. That tension is released through bursts of delayed and fuzzed-out guitar backed by an air-tight rhythm section. That’s not to say the band uses the ‘loud-quiet-loud’ dynamic as a crutch, though. The songs still felt varied, and the volume was applied where it was most advantageous. This set is up there with Carnivores at the Atlas Sound show a few weeks ago for the best opening band I’ve seen so far this year. The band currently has two releases available through Bandcamp, which I suspect will be well worth your time.
A Classic Education had some big shoes to fill as a follow-up, and didn’t quite measure up to the unique punch of The Dirty Dishes. Still, the Bologna, Italy-based fivesome delivered a set of solid, enjoyably garage-y rock tunes. The songs felt well-crafted instrumentally, with some nice interplay between the two guitarists, and the keyboardist when she was audible. The house mixing was unfortunately godawful during this part of the night, so vocals from frontman Jonathan Clancy were also mostly unintelligible. The band made due with the limitations though, and the set picked up toward the end with a couple of interesting, longer songs with a heavier instrumental focus.
It would be forty-five minutes after A Classic Education’s final song when Cloud Nothings finally took the stage. The delay was seemingly the result of a start time prescribed by, uh, MTV. Strangely enough, this show was scheduled to be broadcast on MTV’s Hive website, as indicated to us by numerous posters, notices informing us that we would be filmed and photographed, roving cameramen, and a large MTV logo projected on the wall. I’m glad that a band as good as Cloud Nothings warrants this kind of attention, and I think it’s great that people who couldn’t make it to this sold-out show for whatever reason were still able to watch and listen in, but the whole night did have a weirdly corporate vibe. ‘Corporate’ is generally not the atmosphere that anyone is aiming for at a garage punk show with an audience of under four hundred people. The waving middle fingers and chants of “FUCK MTV” from the crowd pretty evidently confirmed this.
Any minor annoyance that the MTV presence created was forgotten once Dylan Baldi and crew took the stage, however. Baldi’s only bit of stage banter for the entire night would be a brief “Hi, we’re a band called Cloud Nothings from Cleveland, Ohio,” before immediately kicking into ‘Stay Useless.’ I remember reading a tweet during the week of SXSW describing a Cloud Nothings set as “an absolute fireball,” and that phrase began kicking around again in my head immediately as the band started playing. Baldi didn’t need to say much because there wasn’t much to say. The urgency and intensity of these songs spoke for themselves. By ‘these songs’ I refer to all eight tracks from this year’s phenomenal Steve Albini-produced Attack on Memory, which unsurprisingly comprised the whole of the main set (in addition to “part of a new song”).
Albini would claim to not have an identifiable ‘sound’ when producing records, but there’s something about his method that always makes the drums and bass stand out to me. Attack on Memory is no different, and in a live setting the rhythm section shaped and propelled these songs as much the heavy electric guitars and Baldi’s raw, powerful vocals. Cloud Nothings felt like a cohesive unit last night, a far cry from the band’s origins as Baldi’s solo lo-fi noise pop project. Members TJ Duke, Jayson Gerycz, and Joe Boyer were all as energetically tuned into the performance as Baldi was.
The record’s confessional lyrics and overall heavier sound have drawn the band comparisons to classic nineties post-hardcore bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and Unwound. Seeing the band live confirms the validity of these comparisons. The heaviness of the album was amplified, quite literally, in a live setting. Everything was unreasonably loud and no one cared. The more pop-leaning tracks like ‘Stay Useless’ and album closer ‘Cut You’ remained fairly faithful to the album versions, but hit just a little bit harder and faster. Album centerpiece ‘Wasted Days’ stretched beyond its already lengthy nine minute runtime as Baldi manipulated the massive whirling chaos of the song’s midsection with two delay pedals on the floor. Screaming along to the song’s final chorus of “I THOUGHT/I WOULD/BE MORE/THAN THIS” with everyone else in the room was a definite show highlight.
Following the set closing ‘No Future/No Past’ and a brief encore of older tunes, the show ended just shy of an hour after it started. Normally such a short headlining set might be cause for concern, but extending this show further might have lessened its punch. Succinctness is not always a bad thing when it comes to live shows, especially when a band conjures up a set as intensely impactful as this one in under an hour.
