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Album Review
Kevin Greenspon/ Cloud Nothings Kevin Greenspon + Cloud NothingsBridgetown Records
Article written by
Ged M - Nov 11, 2010
Kevin Greenspon + Cloud Nothings
An album with five tracks each from California’s Kevin Greenspon and Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings, this runs to just 18 and a half minutes of lo-fi fast-paced punky pop. Kevin Greenspon’s contributions are pop songs buried under walls of fuzzy noise with melodies occasionally scratching their way through; it sounds like a bedroom recording if your bedroom was next to a motorway where lorries carrying fragile objects were constantly crashing. But he’s brilliant at squeezing existentialist malaise into a two minute pop-burst, as he does with ‘Carpool Pepsi’ and ‘Growing Up’, while ‘Open Book’ is a glorious mess of noise with slightly creepy lyrics (breaking and entering, stealing diaries). A finer way to spend 9 minutes I can’t think!
Cloud Nothings’ 5 tracks are short but crucial, from the the punk-pop kiss-off ‘You’re Not Good At Everything’ to the superfast distortion of ‘Dead Girl’ with its lyrics consisting of just 7 words repeated. The longest track is the best; at an indulgent 2’26, ‘I Apologise’ is suffused with a great mood of melancholy and the chiming guitars sound anything but lo-fi. Dylan Baldi is making some of the best American music right now and his and Kevin Greenspon’s efforts make this super-limited release well worth tracking down.