It's all about the songs. However much breath is spent unravelling the Cleveland group's progression and the poetic, harmonic and formal qualities embraced and/or lost across nine albums, their essence endures in the memorable trail of the song. Anthemic, lived with the heart in the throat and with the urgency of the words released there, never falling into the populist trap (lol, Arcade Fire), but cut for full-throated singalongs and a fixed place in the collective indie consciousness: 'Wasted Days', 'Modern Act', 'On an Edge' or, of course, 'I'm Not Part of Me' — a long list that the most devoted stans will always shuffle in memory of that moment when the world seemed full of possibilities, or when Dylan Baldi's words mirrored that university crush. A fundamental part of a possible indie lore that can be born anywhere and shaped the character of Superchunk, Built to Spill or Wavves.
Without dwelling on that past — germinated in the lo-fi bedroom solitude of a first self-titled album and made real from the canonical 'Attack on Memory' — the band led by Baldi, flanked by his long-time companion Jayson Gerycz on drums and multi-instrumentalist Chris Brown, keeps pace with its own songwriting instincts on 'Final Summer', its first record on Pure Noise after years of allegiance to Carpark.
Without straying far from a formula sketched on the aforementioned 'Attack on Memory' and definitively stamped on 'Here and Nowhere Else' — a link between the energy of Hüsker Dü's 'New Day Rising' and the pop instinct of the Replacements — and with the sways and twists needed to keep it alive across a discography where the torn grime of the guitars and the propulsion of the drums served a very catchy sensibility, 'Final Summer' brightens the production and, with it, the aura of Cloud Nothings in 10 songs that evoke the naturalness of those with nothing left to prove. And they have nothing to prove. Let us sing, then. BS.