After last weekend, I wanted to keep the Sunday Run Album Review going as a motivational tool for myself. A motivational tool for Sundays, anyway. With CoolMom away, though, I was on swim meet duty this Sunday. A run wasn't going to happen. But in a rare moment of efficient time management for me, I managed to hop on the elliptical at the Y while CoolDaughter #2 had her swim class on Saturday. I used my time to correct what has been an egregious oversight on my part since the summer. I listened to Superchunk's latest, I Hate Music, with the goal of finally saying something about it here.
This album has stumped me a bit. It's always hardest for me to review something when all I can keep thinking to myself is, "I love this record." I love this record.
I tried to think about what I love about it, and then it dawned on me. A while back, I posted the video for I Hate Music track, "Void." Shot at Brooklyn's Shea Stadium, the video depicts a group of middle-aged folks (Superchunk members Jon Wurster, Laura Ballance, and Jim Wilbur and writers / actors Jon Benjamin, Jon Glaser, and Ted Travelstead) attending a rock show at the venue. In my haste to say, "This video is making fun of old people like me. Ha ha ha," I missed the point. After a few cringeworthy minutes of the group's experience at Shea, the video ends on a beautifully uplifting note that would seem to say that you're never too old to be moved to joy by music.
On their follow-up to 2010's excellent Majesty Shredding, which was the band's first record in almost a decade, Superchunk show that they're just getting better with time. Solid from beginning to end, I Hate Music drenches its sometimes melancholy lyrics (The album is dedicated to a close friend of the band who died in 2012.) in the upbeat sounds that have always characterized the band.
From fantastic opener, "Overflows," ("Everything that you won't see, just swirls around, comes down and buries me.") to album-closer, "What Can We Do," with its images of a couple with "wrinkles around [their] eyes," I Hate Music shows itself to be an album that could only have been made by a band with some mileage on the odometer. Single "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo" -- the song that opens with the album's titular phrase and continues, "What is it worth? Can't bring anyone back to this earth" -- paints a picture of riding around, feet on the dashboard, listening to your favorite music. "Trees of Barcelona" describes exploring that great city with friends following a festival appearance.
Guitarist Jim Wilbur is positively J Mascisian on "Low F," a song that would have made my Favorite Songs of 2013 Playist if it weren't for my stupid rules. Other standouts, "FOH," and just-over-one-minute burner, "Staying Home," showcase Superchunk at their frantic best.
Even the title of this one speaks to me. I love music. It's a huge part of my life; and, as I've said before, I associate one song or another with almost every important moment. But, after a while, you realize that your favorite music, your favorite songs aren't the things that are really ever going to save you, change your life, or pull you up during your lowest moments. That's all on you. It's easy, sometimes, to hate music for making you think it could do that for you.
Then you hear something like I Hate Music; and you can say, "Yeah. I've got a lot of work ahead of me. Just give me about 40 minutes. I'm gonna go listen to this record, and then I'll be ready for anything."
I Hate Music is out now on Merge.
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