The Cloud Nothings were spotted roaming the streets of Over-the-Rhine at the 2012 MidPoint Music Festival, where the band had just delivered its raucous brand of melodic Post Punk. Frontman Dylan Baldi, ever-disheveled in a hoodie and scraggly beard, was overheard delivering the following observation to his bandmates, powerhouse drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist TJ Duke: “I didn’t know Cincinnati was this interesting.”
The same can be said of the music Baldi makes with his band, which has moved from a lo-fi, one-man bedroom project in his native Cleveland to a world-touring unit produced by the likes of Steve Albini and John Congleton.
If 2012’s Albini-helmed breakthrough Attack on Memory expanded Cloud Nothings’ sonic assault in ways both unexpected (Baldi’s nasally vocals are front and center amid the frenzied guitars) and obvious (in typical Albini fashion, the drums sound like they could crumble a poorly buttressed building), the new Congleton-aided Here and Nowhere Else refines the band’s strengths: hook-laden, angst-driven Rock & Roll that buries itself in one’s cortex days after exposure.
“Music that is 100 percent happy is terrifying,” Baldi told Pitchfork earlier this year. “I would kill myself if I had to play that every night. If music is one constant emotion, then it’s not real. But if you include the positive and negative and everything in between — which I don’t think we do, but I’m learning — that’s what makes it feel real.”
CLOUD NOTHINGS play at Southgate House Revival Wednesday, Oct. 1. Find tickets/more info
here .
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2014.