More spirited, scrappy lo-fi grunge from Cloud Nothings

The joyful thrash of Cloud Nothing's fourth record 'Here And Nowhere Else' may be all too familiar but it's defiantly so...

Cloud Nothings - Here And Nowhere Else (OUT 31ST MARCH) 

First things first, let it be said that the drummer of Cloud Nothings is a bloody hero;
Here And Nowhere Else opens at a formidable pace that rarely abates across the eight tracks the band hurtle through in a lightning quick 30 minutes, and Jayson Gerycz is the ever-accelerating motor that drives everything. Breakneck? Pah, this guy drums that kind of speed for breakfast. So aside for my suspicion that said drummer must be all kinds of exhausted after each gig and undoubtedly a few buckets of sweat lighter, what else to be said for
Here And Nowhere Else... It's an impatient album as you might expect from the above. An album forever in a hurry to finish. It certainly doesn't rock the boat much in terms of the Cloud Nothing's you'll likely know and love from 2012's splendid
Attack On Memory but, it does dial everything up a notch. So all the familiar hallmarks are present and correct. Those galloping drums, driving bass and blown-out guitars underpinning Dylan Baldi's lazy sneer and explosive larynx-rip. There are echoes of
Nirvana (the atonal yelps of
"swall-ow"
'Giving Into Seeing' virtually lifted from
'Milk It'), the barroom rasp of The Replacement's Paul Westerberg (
'Just See Fear'), hints of Idlewild in their infancy before they discovered REM (
'Quieter Today'), and even the punk emo exuberance of the youthful Saves The Day (
'Now Here In'). All in all it conjures a fine concoction of rabble-rousing party brew. The album's seven minute opus
'Pattern Walks' runs the whole gamut. There's a moment's Pixies of pounding bass and circling guitar, the chorus takes the intonation of 'Eton Rifles' and later on, the opening riff from Supergrass 'Richard III' segues into a last minute chorus, full of pedal-to-the-metal guitar a la The Walkman's 'The Rat'. Despite the obvious nods it's fairly ace. If there is minor complaint to be made though it's that the best moments of  
Here and Nowhere Else most recall Cloud Nothings themselves. The breakdown and main hook of
'I'm Not Part Of Me' is fractions apart from the fizzy head rush of Attack On Memorys
'Stay Useless', likewise the last-minute anthemic chorus of
'Giving Into Seeing' recalls that album's '
Cut You'. It's a muddier affair than that album though; the aforementioned drums  thrust high in the mix threatening a show-steal at every turn with Baldi content to slightly bury his vocal hooks beneath the fog of distortion but really at the end of the day it would be churlish not too succumb to the album's pummelling charms. Let's park the nagging question as to whether it's a trick overplayed for next time...
7/10
http://cloudnothings.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA-Fz7Zd39k  

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