It is really hard to believe that Dylan Baldi is only 20, is he? At his age I was into music I would really be ashamed of these days (I am not going to tell you), and this guy and his band Cloud Nothings play some aggressive noise-punk-rock I wasn’t even aware of when I was his age. Now that their last effort, ‘Attack on Memory’ has received the Pitchfork-approval, the band was ready for the FYF fest on Saturday.
They were playing just before Fucked Up on the Spring stage, Damian called them affectuously his ‘homies’ and Cloud Nothings may have learned something from the Canadian band when they were touring together, as their set was a violent chaotic thing, with thunderous guitars building a heavy and aggressive sound. Baldi’s delivery was sometimes raucous, other times tired and detached, often aggressive and screamed with despair and horror, almost in a sort of Cobain-style, as if he was announcing the end of the world – after all there is a track entitled ‘No Future/No Past’ on their last release ‘Attack On Memory’, which sounded like a Nirvana tune.
They played long instrumentals, morphing into tempests of noise, building distortion over distortion, reaching new levels, stretching into a long post-rock delirium, a wall of noise denser and thicker than the nonexistent clouds in Los Angeles blue sky. It was interesting and definitively not your average pop-rock song.
As they were often playing with their back turned to the crowd, I was noticing that the music was not exactly triggering a lot of movement, although a few people attempted some crowd surfing. It was certainly not heavy on hooks or the hooks may have been in the nervous and assaulting riffs themselves,.. and I may have filmed the poppiest of the songs they played, as the rest was tougher sounding, more experimental, much darker, and definitively more epic, like the never-ending raging ‘Wasted Days’, which was ruminating during long parts to capture a new groove.
I read everywhere that the band’s sound has changed so dramatically on this new Steve Albini-produced album, that Baldi wanted to change his moniker; so far they are still Cloud Nothings. I am not sure why they chose this enigmatic name, but its dreamy-nihilistic duality totally fitted their loud and complex set at the FYF fest.