Alright you slack motherfuckers, you snot-nosed bachelor’s degree-wielding punks, you Simpsons-quoting meme machines, you couch-riding stoners, you unconcerned and underused masses — Superchunk has a message for you:
Yeah, yeah: “Superchunk’s old now,” “Superchunk doesn’t get the kids,” “Superchunk yelled at me from their porch” — I’ve heard it all. But they’re still plugging away at this music thing, even though they were pretty clear on the whole I Hate Music angle back in 2013. But then something happened in the past year and a half or so, something in November 2016 that just made Mac and co. go, “Y’know, maybe we still have something relevant to say.”
What that something was, we may never know, but that’s the price of aging: your mind wanders, you forget things, your hair falls out (well, Jim Wilbur lost his hair a while ago), you break your hip pogoing or hopping off a Marshall stack with your knock-off Fender Strat. You get really angry at stuff, but you don’t know why.1
But somebody dunked Mac, Laura, Jim, and Jon in the Fountain of Youth or something, because “Cloud of Hate” sounds like it was tailor-made for the On the Mouth era. They’re pissed-off kids again, and they absolutely sound like it. They mean it. And thank god for it.
Oh! I know what it was: last year’s presidential election, etc. That’s why we were mobilizing all of you up there in paragraph one. Yeah, so, Superchunk wants you to be as angry as them, and they want you to fight back against the toxic sludge of current policy. That’s why there’s this blistering minute-thirteen video directed by Taiyo Kimura. It’s all-out rallying cry, a total blast. “Cloud of Hate” float me away indeed.
What a Time to Be Alive is out right now on Merge. Read our review of it here.
1. Look, we’re not above making old-age jokes here. I’m not as old as the Superchunkers, but I’m not that far behind.
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