aaamusic | On 01, Feb 2012

Attack on Memory by the Cloud Nothings opens with the melancholia and angst of No Future/No past and unfortunately for many this doesn’t change as you progress through the album. It feels easy to dismiss straight off as the same old teenage angst we call ‘emo’ and with a lot of the lyrics it’s unavoidable, ‘I know life’s not gonna change… I thought I would be more than this’. Wasted Days, the second track, continues this theme of loathing and often, self-pity. But however sigh-worthy this may seem at times, it most definitely does have its place. Sometimes you do feel so low that you just want to listen to something that reflects those feelings that we all get. And Attack on Memory is surely gold for those times! Despite this, dare I say, emo gold, I can’t help feeling that Wasted Days goes on for far too long as a song: 8 minutes, 56 seconds feels just too long for a song that could have finished after 3 minutes, and one cannot help but feel the desire to just skip on to the next track. The length doesn’t really fit the style of the songs, the shorter songs on this album really are the best and suited to this grunge-indie style the band seems to have going for them.

It may be easy to jump to a quick dislike of this album, with the bluntly emotional lyrics and the raw vocals but there are indeed some excellent highlights. Fall in and Stay Useless are both very good pop songs in their own respect. And Separation is a nice instrumental interval.

Our Plans has a nihilistic feel, which could have been interesting but feels underdeveloped as a song. ‘No one knows our plans for us’ denotes a sense of rejection of religion, however this is pretty much all there is to convey that, as the song is quite stripped of lyrical detail. Interesting idea though. The last track, Cut You, is aggressive and goes against the band’s good point of relatability, ‘I miss you cause I like damage, I need something I can hurt’. The song goes too far into an extreme of the unpleasant and feels like a harsh way to end the album.

Overall if you approach the album with an open mind, there is certainly something to get out of it. However, for those who are sceptical to bitter-raw emotion, this will not be the album for you. But on the whole it works as a good angst album and sometimes that is just what somebody needs.

Rose Benge