The Great Dismal

Langue disponible : anglais

The fourth album from the Philadelphia shoegaze band Nothing is their most ambitious yet. After founding guitarist Brandon Setta left the band following 2018's Dance on the Blacktop, the group enlisted Doyle Martin, frontman/guitarist for the beloved Indiana doom-gaze band Cloakroom, to play guitar and sing a few harmonies. That team-up is essentially the 2010's equivalent of Kevin Shields bringing Slowdive's Neil Halstead into My Bloody Valentine, and with revered producer Will Yip on the boards, ex-Deafheaven guitarist Nick Bassett providing additional production assistance, and guest appearances from indie luminary Alex G and experimental harpist Mary Lattimore, The Great Dismal is a shoegaze triumph.

On a purely sonic level, the record is the best-sounding set of songs they've ever released, and arguably one of the most well-crafted shoegaze albums of the 21st century. Although their earliest stuff is more abrasive and viscerally crushing, there's so much space in the mix here that the heavy parts feel mammoth while the soft parts have an unearthly stillness to them. It sounds like they're playing in some sort of gargantuan chapel with dizzyingly high ceilings, but without the cacophonous echo that such an environment would create. Then there are the songs themselves.

"Catch A Fade" is the hookiest pop song they've ever written while the industrial "Say Less" is the most menacing. "Famine Asylum" and "April Ha Ha" feature their signature bouncy grooves (i.e. their Hum influence that really came through on their early albums), while "Bernie Sanders" achieves so much atmosphere with just a wiggly bassline and scythe-slicing reverse reverb riffs. Each song is imbued with something special, but opener "A Fabricated Life" is unequivocally the most affecting, as it's the most musically celestial and lyrically gutting song Nothing have ever made. "What else can I ask for?/ I've pummeled through my time," frontman Dominic Palermo breathily intones during the hook. Like all Nothing albums, The Great Dismal straddles life, death, meaning, and nihilism with equal measure, but this is the first time that their music has been able to match the magnificence of their grandiose existential quandaries. © Eli Enis/Qobuz