Until now, Cleveland indie-pop wunderkind Dylan Baldi has stuck to a familiar script: Shy teenager holes up in his bedroom and puts heart on sleeve (or, rather, into a home-recording device), but deliberately obscures his sentimental musings with fuzzy guitars and washed-out production. The next obvious move would be to hook up with a big-name producer and trick some drunk major-label A&R guy into thinking this project could be the next Green Day.
But while Attack on Memory makes good on the first half of that equation—it was recorded by alt-rock architect Steve Albini—it doesn’t so much capture the sound of a young songwriter maturing as the thrill of a beast unleashed. Baldi’s songs have never lacked for passion, but with his band solidified into a muscular and gnarly power trio, Attack on Memory amplifies that youthful yearning into do-or-die desperation, with Baldi’s once-winsome voice yielding to a throat-shredding, Cobain-esque wail.
Compared to the summery imagery seen in Cloud Nothings’ music videos to date, Attack on Memory presents a grim, cinema-vérité portrait of the uncertainty of early adulthood, and while Baldi has not completely forsaken his potential as a pop-punk prodigy, he uses it as a decoy. “Wasted Days,” for instance, tricks you into thinking it’s a revved-up rocker before taking a sudden detour into a dark psych-punk vortex and keeping you there for six suffocating minutes. Teenage angst has paid off well, a rich dead rock star once sang, but in Attack on Memory, we hear one young man’s defiant refusal to grow bored and old.
Playlist Picks: “Wasted Days,” “Stay Useless,” “Separation”
