The 15th album from Bob Mould opens with the 64-year-old indie-rock icon searching for serenity in a world on fire. Over slow, spaciously grinding guitar-pop, he finds himself alone on a mountain, surveying an expanse of natural beauty despoiled by strife and terror — warplanes in the sky, cities in collapse. But he’s above it all: “I’m so far away from here/Did you see me disappear,” he wonders as the song lifts off into a crescendo of beautiful chaos.
For longtime Mould-watchers the inward-odyssey he maps out here will be familiar — after all, this is an artist who changed the face of American underground rock with Hüsker Dü’s 1984 double-album Zen Arcade, a psychedelic thrash epic about a kid who flees a broken home to find love and freedom. Fans could also go back to “Hoover Dam,” a similarly majestic moment from Copper Blue, his wonderful 1992 album fronting Sugar, in which he stood high on a national monument “on the centerline/Right between two states of mind.”
Here Wer Go Crazy wanders the same landscape of tumultuous noise and roiling emotions he’s been navigating since he co-founded Hüsker Dü in 1979. Mould, drummer Grant Hart, and bassist Greg Norton brought a new language of unguarded personal honesty to an early-Eighties post-hardcore scene where the default emotions were still angst and alienation. As a solo artist, he’s always worked to reach for moments of light in a world that eternally seems to be coming unglued. Recently, 2019’s Sunshine Rock was a sonically and lyrically cheerful balm against tough times (he’d recently lost both his parents), while 2000’s Blue Hearts lit a punk-rock torch against the Trump regime.
Since then, he’s taken time to reflect, noting in a press release accompanying his first album in five years that he’s been exploring the California desert. He’s returned with one of his most immediately thrilling records, in the power-trio lineup he loves backed by his longtime rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Nardoucy. On gems like “Hard to Get” and “Neanderthal” they nail a quintessential Mould-ian mix of pounding aggression, oceanic guitar buzz, and teaming melody. The mountainous “Breathing Room” slows down the pace but not the drive, as the band hammers away and Mould sings about finding space to think. “When Your Heart is Broken” rockets to the top of his canon, right up there with the Dü’s “Makes No Sense At All” and Sugar’s “Helpless” in its ability to mix effortless anthemic tunefulness with a harried feelings-first urgency. Mould’s amiably snarled vocals can sometimes get swallowed in the headlong din, but the force of his meaning always comes through.
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There are moments that seem to intentionally call back to expand on highlights from his past. On “You Need To Shine,” lines like “Celebrate the moments we shared across the years/ Celebrate the laughter and the tears” can’t help but evoke his 1985 Hüsker Dü classic “Celebrated Summer.” The album’s production has a bright, bracing sound that brings to mind the way Sugar balanced indie-rock tumult and alt-rock polish just as well as Nirvana or the Pixies.
But he never sounds like he’s going backward. It’s the sense of constant growth and accrued wisdom in these songs — the honest ambivalence mixed with desire mixed with dread mixed with hope — that makes them sink in. On the tempestuously rumbling “Sharp Little Pieces” metaphorical allusions to intrusion, erosion, and decay seem to compound the song’s theme of interpersonal drama by also intimating the wear and tear of physical aging. On “Thread So Thin,” he tells us, “I can see forever in my rear view mirror,” against waves of miasmic distortion that might be pushing him onward and pulling him down. He closes the album with another solo guitar moment, the poetic “Your Side,” a simple tender song about finding solace in the everyday story of getting older with someone you love. “I’m turning gray by your side,” he sings softly. Of course, the song doesn’t stay quiet for long. Pretty soon the band locks in and they’re blasting away beautifully. Serene contentment? He’ll take it. Slowing down? Eh, not so much.
