The Albums That Matter: The Black Hole Understands

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

The Black Hole Understands

Cloud Nothings

2020

Surprisingly, this has never happened before—I already wrote about The Black Hole Understands on the blog, as part of our Song of the Week column. If you want my opinion about how good this album is, I guess that would be a good place to start. Do I really have all that much more to add in my The Albums That Matter column? Not really, but let's see if we can get like five or six solid paragraphs out of it anyway.

I guess it's fortuitous that Cloud Nothings announced last week that they have a new album upcoming early next year, because that really inspired me to think more about how fucking great their most recent album is. The Black Hole Understands really does breathe life into their signature hard-edged pop rock, a formula that was, truth be told, getting a little stale. I'll listen to Cloud Nothings all day, but it'll start to blend together after a while. The songs during The Black Hole Understand's brief 30-minute runtime would stand out in a Cloud Nothings marathon. They are fresh and full of life—ironic that it took a total breakdown of modern society for an album like this to come to fruition.

Yes, this is a "quarantine album," which is a term that will be passed around a lot more once the quarantine comes to an end (officially—I know the majority of Americans are going against CDC recommendations and not even pretending to quarantine any longer). Dylan Baldi and the gang recorded all their parts separately on GarageBand, and then put 'em all together via the internet. The wild thing is that, when we look back at all the quarantine albums that came out in 2020, The Black Hole Understands is going to stand out as an outlier. It doesn't have that "bedroom music" quality that a lot of these albums tend to have. It doesn't strip back the artist's signature sound at all, like, say, folklore did (PoYB—the only blog that's laying down Taylor Swift / Cloud Nothings comparisons).

Rather than go softer to reflect how silent the world was while we were all stuck at home, Cloud Nothings pushed against that tendency, and hard. While it's absent of the face-rippers that tended to populate the past few albums, there is a concentration on melody here, and once the melody is nailed down, then the volume is turned up to max. Songs like "An Average World" are hummable, but then check out that tight-grip ending that barrels toward cacophony. Bedroom pop this is not.

Here's something interesting—the Cloud Nothings album that is being released next February, The Shadow I Remember, has been in the can since before even the first U.S. citizen contracted COVID. The band has been sitting on a completed album for that long, and managed to create and release an entirely different album under entirely different circumstances in the meantime. I understand that this is in actuality due to record label contract peculiarities or whatever, but I'm still curious as to the emotional reasoning in making and publishing The Black Hole Understands during the pandemic, rather than just, ya know, releasing the album that was already made?

We will find out next year what about The Shadow I Remember made it unfit for these troubling times, but we can at least talk about what about The Black Hole Understands made it incredibly fitting for the year 2020. 

Look—it's really easy to take lyrics or quotes from anything and apply it to "these unprecedented times." But it wouldn't be out of line to assume that Dylan Baldi is singing about the pandemic here, since it was created during and because of the pandemic. When you listen to "The Mess Is Permanent," for example, it's incredibly appropriate to assume you know exactly what he means when he says: "It's hard to be in this city / it's hard to be in this town / it's hard to be in this place / when all the walls are crumbling down." What else could he possibly be talking about other than the feelings we have all feeling in the past seven months?

So I'd argue that the generally fun pop/hard rock sound that Cloud Nothings employs on this record works on another level more important than "this is clearer and more melodic than their previous work." It works because we need to hear big, bold, clear, and fun rock music while the walls around us are crumbling. Screaming breakdowns like Attack on Memory's "Wasted Days" still work, but that's not what we need right now. I'm glad that Cloud Nothings didn't lean harder into the nihilism than they usually do, though I'm sure the temptation was there. The Black Hole Understands is the perfect album for an imperfect time in our lives.

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If this album sounds interesting, then try this song: "The Sound of Everyone"

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Stray Observations

• I bought this album on a Friday on Bandcamp. I know there are plenty of artists deserving of our money, and I'm not sure what spurred me to choose Cloud Nothings that Friday in July, but I'm glad it happened. This album is worth ten bucks, easy.
• I read through Dylan Baldi's AMA from July to prep for this blog post, though I can't say I took too much from it. I definitely needed to confirm that the existence of another album was known in July (he confirms it), but otherwise it's just people asking stock AMA questions that bore the piss out of me.
• I also briefly followed Cloud Nothings on Twitter, but unfollowed after a while. I did consider briefly whether I should reach out via Twitter to see if there was an actual explanation for why The Shadow I Know wasn't just released in July instead of making a whole new album... but ultimately, I decided that I'm not that kind of fan.
• I do appreciate that Dylan Baldi and his girlfriend Sad13 (a.k.a. Sadie Dupuis from Speedy Ortiz) are very adorable on social media. And they live in Philly! It's a shame I won't be running into them at El Bar any time soon!
• ALBUM COVER: Fuck, man, I never know what the hell Cloud Nothings covers are supposed to be. Bummer I didn't think to ask him in his AMA.
• ALBUM NAME: This wasn't explained either, but I can imagine that it has to do with being so cooped up and depressed during a global pandemic that you find your relating to the dense nothingness of a black hole.
• Just like I assumed above that the reason The Shadow I Remember was in the can for about a year was because of lame boring record company reasons, I'm also assuming that the reason The Black Hole Understands is STILL not on Spotify is because of lame boring record company reasons. I wouldn't normally give a fuck, but it's rendering the only thing I use Spotify for incomplete.

NEXT TIME: The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance