Cloud Nothings - s/t

Melodies, melodies, melodies. Here's a tip for the young musicians looking for a sense of direction: stop painfully carving away at your shitty riffs and just go for the feeling. The reason music is so successful for the human race is our recognition of catchy hooks. It's those 3 or 4 seconds that you replay over and over again to yourself, the dreaded earworm that both inspires and annoys us. So naturally, an album that basically builds itself upon catchy melodies is bound to be good, right? Pretty much.

Enter Cloud Nothings: the lo-fi brainchild of Dylan Baldi that essentially reeks of simplistic pop melodies. On his debut album Turning On, Baldi sets aside any sort of complexities and comes straight from the heart. It's a nostalgic effort, one that was most likely recorded on a late 90's over-the-shoulder video camera in your basement 10 summers ago. The mix is so buried and modest that it actually brightens with several listens, revealing cute guitar licks and fiery drums. However, with Cloud Nothings, the band is no longer in your shoddy basement, but rather playing on a crowded stage in a relatively popular downtown bar.

Now, I don't want to make too big of a deal about this - because, in the long run, the songwriting is easily the most important part of any music project - but the shift in production style sort of ruins the overall image I loved from Cloud Nothings. The hard-hitting percussion and the now overly prevalent guitar nearly flash punk rock at times. Take "Should Have" for example: the in-your-face guitar plays a pop guitar riff that completely drives the song. It almost comes across as a montage song segueing two scenes from Malcolm In the Middle together. Yet again, I want to stress that this isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but it does detract from the overall quality of the album.

But honestly the biggest problem with Cloud Nothings is that it doesn't hold as many notable melodies as Turning On. That's really it - which, if anything, only confirms that the lo-fi genre is a bit of a crapshoot. Baldi is a seriously talented writer, but the riffs on Cloud Nothings don't stick as well and somehow lose their intimacy through the recordings. The legitimately great tracks ("Understand at All", "Not Important", "On The Radio") are catchy, fun, and fit nicely with Cloud Nothings' young catalog; but the otherwise mediocre songs ("Should Have", "Rock", "You're Not That Good at Anything") are nothing more than failed riffs that never really get off the ground.

There is a silver lining though: Cloud Nothings is still in the early stages and the low points on this album are merely setbacks regarding filler riffs and questionable production. It's adolescence and it's forgettable; but the melodies, the defining factor for a band like Cloud Nothings, come up somewhat short.

3/5

Recommended Tracks: "Understand at All", "Not Important", "On The Radio"