Tympanogram Grade: B+

The impending end of a person’s teenage years is an awkward time for anyone. Ideals that were held dear growing up are challenged, new ideas are constantly being introduced and incorporated. As a result, individuals can change drastically in a matter of months. For Cloud Nothings, that sort of change is evident in the band’s music, even if it’s not true in their personal lives. Attack On Memory is not a complete overhaul in the sound they’ve cultivated to this point in their career, but it represents a different trajectory, certainly.

The band’s self-titled 2011 debut marked off a corner of the lo-fi/punk market for the Cleveland four-piece. It was a burst of snotty energy, dressed down in Converse and an attitude of underdog entitlement; Cloud Nothings was confident and quick in its catchiness.

Attack On Memory, however, while it retains much of that attitude, proves that the band can do more than write two-minute screeds railing against the popular kids in his high school. Dylan Baldi, the force behind Cloud Nothings, has been hurt, and he’s unafraid to let that natural heartbreak work itself out on its own terms. It’s a universal truth: the end of teenaged love is a fertile ground for crappy art, although in the case of Cloud Nothings, it ends up being pretty damn spectacular.

The album starts off fairly innocuously, although if you’re familiar with Cloud Nothings, the opening piano strains might be off putting. “No Future/No Past” takes a long wind-up, meandering through the same, simple lyrics (“give up, come to, no, we’re through”) on its way to Baldi’s explosive conclusion of “no future, no past.” It’s a different take on what Cloud Nothings can do, and then the band follows it up with the extensive “Wasted Days,” a nearly nine-minute expanse, with a five-and-a-half-minute instrumental in the middle.

Taken together, those two songs comprise nearly 40% of the album’s 34 minutes, but the rest of the album, while comprising only of 6 songs, is no slouch. While it will sound more familiar to fans of the band than the first two songs, it finds the band at the most pop-centric (“Stay Useless”) and sing-along-able (“Fall In”); in short, the band has obviously started to grow up, and are much more capable at song-writing than their back catalog of brevity would let on.

Attack On Memory is passionate, angry, throaty, and catchy in all the right ways. Thematically it might be well-worn, but to expect more from a tandem of late-teen/early twentysomethings would be misguided. These guys are running across familiar lyrical ground, but they’re capable enough to do it in a compelling way. It’s a great next step for a band that could easily have been dismissed as a garage/punk one-off after their first album.

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Cloud Nothings // No Sentiment [mp3] from Attack On Memory