Bob Mould Band

 

When he calls, Bob Mould is finishing work on his 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy. A distillation of the unfailing melodic skill, the emotional lucidity and dynamic fluency he’s developed over more than four decades, it’s also a typically bold realignment of his sonic paradigm. Its turbulent vignettes are scored by Mould’s familiar bruised tunefulness, but the sound is pared back to its fundaments, 11 songs blistering past in just over 30 minutes. “I’ve stripped things back to what excited me as a young guitarist, ”he explains. “The energy, the electricity.”

 

Part of the inspiration for this more primal aesthetic is the heavy itinerary of touring he’s lately undertaken, several years spent circling the globe, either in the company of bandmates Jon Wurster (drums) and Jason Narducy (bass) or just by himself. “I was really throwing myself in the songbook and feeling where the audience is at,” he says. “And they were really responding to this very simple, just-me-and-a-guitar setup. And I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be overcomplicating things, ‘word’-ing or ‘craft’-ing it up. Just grab for the simple bits of life we still have control over: our emotions, our relationships.

 

”After shows, Mould would hang out signing merch and talking to fans. “Sometimes people bring a lot of their lifetime emotional content to me,” he says, “like they’ve compressed all this coal into a tiny little diamond. Sometimes I’m surprised at the weight of it, the heaviness. I’m like, ‘I’m here for you. I’m listening. ’I’m shocked and grateful they share so readily with me. I don’t know what I did to earn that trust.”

 

Mould knows Here We Go Crazy is an album freighted with darkness; “There’s soothing melodies, and there’s lyrical discomfort,” he deadpans. “It’s manic, frantic, complex. ”But no one ever came to Bob Mould for good news, for the easy answers. Pop music runs through his veins, assurely as the electricity that drives his chiming hooks into the realms of distortion, but he’s here to give you the truth, his truth. To give you songs that ring true when howled against a tornado of guitar, that compress all that “lifetime emotional content” into some kind of sonic diamond. There’s eleven of those precious gems here, sculpted to make the heaviness easier to bear, somehow. Treasure them.