Album Review: Superchunk - "Wild Loneliness"

 

First album in four years from alt-rock veterans Superchunk following on from their ferocious What A Time To Be Alive which was a scathing indictment of the Trump regime. It's safe to say that prior to rediscovering the band through that record, I was a bit out of the loop with them having not really listened to much of their stuff since their imperial phase around No Pocky For Kitty, Tossing Seeds etc.

So it's safe to say that Wild Loneliness has come as a bit of a curveball as someone who remembers the group as aggressive proto-grunge growlers - this is certainly the sound of a much more melodic Superchunk with the jangly Teenage Fanclub style guitars and vocal harmonising on the choruses. Even more surprising is that they carry it off pretty well with the likes of Endless Summer and City of the Dead having a nice summery feel to them similar to the vibe of Cornershop's excellent England Is A Garden album a couple of years back while This Night with its soaring horns and the gentle Set It Aside show how much this band have evolved. However, there's still a quiet anger seething underneath the gentle exterior of some of the tracks like Highly Suspect although the big irony is that the track on which they come closest to the trademark Superchunk sound, Refracting, turns out to be the weakest one on here, a burst of discordancy which doesn't really sit well with the gentle feel of the album and just comes across as a bit if an unwelcome interruption really.

There's a pretty impressive guestlist here as well with Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley from Teenage Fanclub and Mike Mills from REM showing up to help out and overall it fits the new more melodic Superchunk style well. Make no mistake, this might not be quite what you're expecting from the band if you're a music fan of a certain vintage but there's a tunefulness to Wild Loneliness that really makes it stand out as one of the better albums I've heard this year. Definitely the sound of a band growing old gracefully.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more