By DCist contributor Tori Kerr
A tidal wave of raging sound engulfed The Black Cat from the moment Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings took the stage until the minute they stepped off. The band wasted no time in pummeling through songs from 2012’s Attack on Memory and their most recent release, Here and Nowhere Else. The latest album has received an overwhelming response, mostly about the slight shift between the two albums to a more focused frustration.
Ripping into “Quieter Today,” from Here and Nowhere Else, the trio front-loaded the set with its most recognizable songs. Frontman Dylan Baldi’s gritty, tense vocals sound great on the new record, clear and immediate, but his vocal chords took on new life on stage. Varying from guttural growls to painful shouts, Baldi lead the anxiety-ridden wall of sound. It was a miracle his voice held up. “Stay Useless,” the lead single off of Attack on Memory, has a relatively melodic pop tone on the record but it was transformed into a broken, desperate plea.
Baldi, drummer Jason Gerycz and bassist TJ Duke were all business. They paused briefly to thank the crowd after “Giving Into Seeing,” before moving into “Fall In,” a twisted tale of how it feels to almost fall in love. But the audience received only a handful of words from the trio all night. Not that it mattered. Despite the fact that they performed fan favorite like “Stay Useless,” “Psychic Trauma” and “Now Here In” early in the night, the band’s energy reached an undeniable climax.
Cloud Nothings’ success comes from their natural resistance to categorization — part punk band and part punk band slowly draining through a sieve, appealing to frustrated, disappointed humans from all the rock sub-genres. They write anthemic songs that beg for thrashing bodies shouting along, but they don’t follow any of the expected punk tropes that accompany those relatable lyrics. This was particularly apparent in “No Future / No Past,” the haunting opener to Attack on Memory and the first song of the encore. For the first time all night the pit paused, as the audience allowed themselves to slip into the eerie darkness. But when the song picked up halfway through and Baldi wrenched the words “We’re through” from his throat, it was like being fully submerged in an icy nightmare.
The band and the crowd had fused into a furious storm by the time they finally reached the nine-minute fury of “Wasted Days.” The neurosis-inducing bass line of the instrumental halfway point built layers and layers of wrath until the song finally erupted into the cathartic flood of “I thought / I would / Be more / Than this.” With its enlightened tones and themes, Here and Nowhere Else has earned the band’s fans admiration and maybe even lead a few to peek over the precipice of the band’s previous gloom. But, it is clearly the tumultuous, tortured earlier album that still provides the most gut-wrenching performances.
Cloud Nothings were prefaced by Ryley Walker, whose expansive, atmospheric folk sound billowed throughout the room. Seated, Walker rested his head on his acoustic guitar like it was a best friend’s shoulder, finger-picked his way through songs from his debut, All Kinds of You. The soulful, open-air quality of Ryley Walker’s music seemed, at first, an odd pairing with the force of Cloud Nothings, but both acts create powerful songs that fill absolutely every inch of space around them.
