Album of the Week (4/01/2014)

While I'm not really into the hijinks often accompanying today's random calendar placement, it must be acknowledged that today is April Fool's Day, as seen by Google's nearly-constant, ongoing "prank" of not letting me connect to Drive.

That said, awesome stuff is happening in the music world. So let it begin...

Cloud Nothings
Here and Nowhere Else
Mom & Pop

Dylan Baldi's vision for Cloud Nothings was to take it from a semi-pop band to a nihilistic punk-Nirvana. He succeeded in achieving the first part of that goal with the band's previous effort, Attack on Memory, but Here and Nowhere Else achieves the second. Being an emo-Kurt Cobain is as hard a job as any redundancy, but being more emo than Kurt Cobain while simultaneously sounding awesome and being a better lyricist is something close to astonishing.

The music here is raw to the point of touching nerves, and plays as fast as possible while trudging through a bleak winterscape. Here, Cloud Nothings perform with reckless abandon and hope they don't leave too many of us behind. They want us to go on this journey with them, but they want us to despise them for it.