RECORDINGS
Bob Mould’s latest album is a head-scratcher — but it works
With four song titles including variations on the word “sun” and a primary-color lollipop of an album cover that suggests a Top-40 bubble gum collection from the ’70s, “Sunshine Rock” (Merge) looks like a head-scratcher of a Bob Mould album.
Mould typically delivers a particularly punishing brand of melodic, guitar-based rock that has few equals in recent decades. His previous three albums — all recorded with the excellent rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy — dealt with the fallout from the death of his parents and reaffirmed his status as a transcendent rock guitarist and singer with a pedigree that includes at least two other indelible power trios, Husker Du and Sugar.
With “Sunshine Rock,” Mould widens the perspective with Wurster and Narducy again at the top of their game. Rather than singing from inside the darkness, he steps back and tries to find glimmers of hope and, dare it be said, happiness. The dozen songs offer a more forgiving perspective on time, memory and the past and how to live with and move beyond it.
By Mould standards, this is a bubble gum record, with big melodies, a brighter-than-usual outlook, even some orchestral sweetening. Ascending bell-like tones underline the rush of optimism in the title song. “Western Sunset” serves as an appropriate bookend, a lush arrangement bursting with renewal. The acoustic “Camp Sunshine” is even more startling, with the singer approaching a childlike innocence, tempered with gentle adult wisdom.
A becalmed Mould can be kind of unnerving, though. Mortality looms over those songs — and it’s central to the wistful “The Final Years.” But Mould’s take on “sunshine” music also includes his trademark wall of sound. Even a cover of Shocking Blue’s ’60s psych-pop obscurity “Send Me a Postcard” crushes any sense of quaint nostalgia.
On “Lost Faith,” Mould toggles between regret and resolve over counterpoint strings and undulating guitars. “This is your last chance to turn around,” he sings.
“I Fought” is just as devastating, a stampede of guitar-bass-drums mayhem that rivals anything in his recent discography for sheer belligerence. It seizes the album’s themes with a mounting ferocity bordering on desperation: “You’re in my memory, you’re in my history, you’re in my everything, every time I sing along with you.” The singer’s both haunted by his past and emboldened by it, his life a chorus of the voices that he can never quite leave behind.
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