Bob Mould: Classic or Dud?

Bob's first solo period was uneven. Everyone praised Workbook, but I didn't get it--there were some fine numbers, to be sure, especially on the first half ("See a Little Light" rose to the top I figure). Black Sheets of Rain, on the other hand, was bleak bleak bleak--the songs were dull, there was no dynamic range (how can there be when the whole thing is full-on?) and I felt there was precious little emotion in the record, something which later Husker Du-era Bob had.

My expectations for Sugar were extremely low after that. It was a really lovely surprise, then, that I utterly adored Copper Blue, which I think had his best songwriting ever ("If I Can't Change Your Mind" remains my favourite song ever written, bar none), and the backing band gave him a spark that made the album fun and exciting again. Plus that guitar sound...mmmm boy! Beaster was darker but still very sonically interesting. And File Under: Easy Listening, while it wasn't up to previous standards, still had quite a few great tracks.

Solo era two...I think David is probably right that his self-titled album is overall his best, with a lot of great numbers and a couple of blasts of guitar noise guaranteed to annoy parents and neighbors. Dog and Pony has some good numbers, but disappoints.

Ultimately, Mould has thrown off some clunkers, but I think the good stuff far outweighs those. And hell, he'd get classic in my book even if was only for that guitar tone. Mmmm.

All his work with Sugar (& later on, I'd gather) is very professional. Cleanly recorded in a dirty way, like Alan Moulder's production work, or _Loveless_. (One song off _File Under: Easy Listening_ "borrows" the melody from "Make a Wish". Also, he used to say something about his ideal show featuring MBV & Sugar on opposite ends of a football field making as much noise as possible.) Meticulous and modulated. Some inspired moments, sure - "If I Can't Change Your Mind" (as Sean noted), "Explode and Make Up", "Gee Angel". However, this professionalism arrived at the expense of any true passion. Sure, on _Beaster_, he screams his lungs out, but it all sounds pheff - not too different from the bevy of nu-metal poseurs out & about. It could just be a matter of him growing old / up - the intensity on older Husker Du material is apparent even when he's not screaming. Sugar sounds cool 'n' all dat, but it's not half as engaging as the messier stuff that preceeded it.

Sometimes I think that, on "I Hate Alternative Rock" ("I wish you had something new to say"), he's talking about himself. Ach - I feel like I'm talking about an ex-girlfriend that didn't live up to my expectations.

Bob Mould solo - Dud

Sugar - Classic

(I then heard a bit of Husker Du and didn't like that either. But nowhere near as little as Sugar.)

Bobby btw is between C and D. Husker Du: Classic. "Copper Blue", when it came out i played it over & over & over again (esp. side 1). Then out of the blue: nothing. Haven't played it since. By the time the next Sugar album came out (crap name for a band also) didn't care anymore as did most of us.

The only thing they really had in common with an indie band was that they loaded their own gear. All three members had been involved with music for ages and never showed much bitterness about their stature. They made some records, played a ton of shows, were professional and smart about what they did and got the fuck out.

Okay -- so they were on Creation in the UK and Ryko (hardly a Touch & Go or Merge) in the US. Technically they were an indie band. However, Sugar never possessed any of the negative connotations I associate with the word 'indie'. I don't care about how many people have regarded Bob Mould too highly. It's not as if he ever whored himself out for the attention. Besides, he was too busy watching wrestling.

Solo= don't like it. The songwriting isn't on that great level.

Sugar= got copper blue and beaster. I love it! I can't undestand Tom's hatred of them. The NME (for once) got it right!

I like Sugar, and like nobody else I liked File Under more than Copper Blue. "Gee Angel" and "Explode & Make Up" and "Your Favorite Thing" are fucking brilliant. The live disc that came with Besides is also absolutely amazing. I really wish I had seen Sugar live; a bit too young.

His only solo stuff I've heard is the s/t one, and it's great, especially the quieter stuff. The harder/louder stuff sounds a little bizarre without a real band.

After Sugar, I just can't get with what Bob has been doing. It started going wrong with that record where he did all of the instruments and the little I have heard after that one wasn't my thing.

Husker Du, parts of his first two solo records and Sugar are great.

It would be nice if Bob Mound could get over it and come to terms with Grant Hart. Even 15 years down the line, it seems like there is some really bad blood between them. Mould seems to want to write Grant Hart out of the history of the band or something. What a grudge or power trip. Mind you this is all based on reading bunches of interviews with both of them. Considering how Sugar ended up, a pattern seems somewhat evident.

Sugar was really good and much more intense live. It was a pretty brave move on Mould's part to tour a few times with that band before they had a record out. I saw them a couple of times, once at Bogarts in Cinci before anything had come out and once later on in Chicago. They were a blinding wall of sound live.

Never saw Husker Du. They were my favorite band when I was 17-18 years old and broke up my senior year in high school. A friend of mine used to have a tape of Husker Du playing on the Joan Rivers show, they did two songs and the set that looked like the cover of Warehouse: Songs and Stories. Joan also had them over briefly to be interviewed. My friend's Mom taped over it a couple of years later...what a loss. (This is the kind of thing that would be great on some deluxe Husker Du reissue, but Bob and Grant haven't been able to work things out to make something like this happen.)

Sorty...sorry.

It would be nice if Bob and Grant buried the hatchet, it would be great to hear the older albums remastered, particularly as they have never really been done justice on CD. But that seems unlikely, even as recently as Modulate the Grant-bashing persists (I thought the line "Some deadbeat Dad who lives at home" in The Receipt was particularly hurtful, Grant also claims that Bob cryptically reveals Grant's address in the lyrics to that song.)

I only saw Sugar once, in 1994 shortly after FU:EL came out - it was one of the biggest disapointments of my life. You just couldn't hear the guitar or vocals at ALL. Several audience members were trying to alert the band to this fact but to no avail.

Perhaps because Sugar were my favourite band when I was fifteen I still feel a very powerful emotional connection with Bob's songs, particularly those on Copper Blue and Warehouse. But I also believe he does the vulnerable lyrics/loud guitars thing better than anybody else. To this day, I tend to put a Bob record on to listen to loud, through headphones, late at night when I'm drunk!

All time favourites would be Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, Warehouse:Songs and Stories, Beaster.

Weaker moments: Candy Apple Grey (in term's of Bob's songs), Modulate.

Pretty much everything else, classic!

Haven't heard Sugar. Bought 'Modulate' the other day. It's okay, not outstanding, but something I'll listen to again, even though he sounds disturbingly like Dave Grohl, which a friend pointed out to me. Haven't heard anything else of his solo stuff, but apparently it's better. So, I'll have to get it.

Can I just say though, Grant Hart's 'Intolerence' is definitely worth getting.

Husker Du - Classic

Bob Mould solo - Dud

Sugar - Classic

-- alex in nyc (vassife...), July 4th, 2001.

Looking back, that seems a bit harsh. While I still prefer Husker Du and Sugar, there have been moments in Bob's solo work that have been quite good.

Sasha otm re: Intolerance - we need a Grant Hart thread..

don't blame bob for that; he came first. although i always thought grohl was a bit closer to grant hart.

love love love husker du, although they started sliping on the last couple albums. i find sugar a tad bit less interesting than, say, jimmy eat world. not a huge waste of talent, just the usual steady decline.

He just seems so unimaginative, so lacking in spark. Sure, he had a good guitar sound. That doesn't give him license to make bog-standard indie fuzz songs for 20 years.

I need to listen some more, but at least for my tastes, Sunshine Rock may be his most enjoyable album since Sugar. I never got into the work he put out after Sugar and before his current trio - it wasn't necessarily bad, but it never clicked with me. Silver Age and its two darker follow-ups were the first Mould albums I kind of enjoyed in a long time, but as mentioned above, they don't break any new ground, musically speaking. I get the feeling most people think Sunshine Rock is more of the same, but I think the songs are fundamentally better - better tunes, better hooks, better production. It's not an enormous difference, but it's enough that it's emerging as a real standout for me.

(FWIW, as much as I like Sugar, the stuff I play most is Hüsker Dü - one of my very favorite bands.)

Sunshine Rock is definitely excellent, a late-era peak. I interviewed him circa then and he said the sleeve was a tribute to the labels of the Beach Boys 7"s he collected and revered as a kid.

Nice! Yeah I noticed, though for me it was the old Beach Boys CD's that used to replicate the same label (not all of them, but most of them starting with the early '90s reissues and box set).

I jumped around some of the earlier trio albums, and Sunshine Rock feels more like a noticeable improvement over the others. Hüsker Dü was often an insanely catchy band to me - arguably a lot of that came from Hart, but I really missed how those tunes came drenched with Mould's guitar. His trio albums may have been a return to that approach, but except for a handful of cuts like "I Don't Know You Anymore," I don't think he really got anything quite on par with that alchemy of sound and songcraft until Sunshine Rock.

I totally missed Blue Hearts (which came out in late September), but it'll be interesting to compare. It's a full-out protest album, but he wrote and possibly recorded some protest songs prior to Sunshine Rock before setting them aside for thematic reasons. I don't know if they're the same songs, but I get the impression tunefulness was more of a secondary concern, so it's possible Sunshine Rock is so engaging due to intent and design as much as a musical breakthrough.

Copper Blue was a Sugar album, clemenza. Sugar was the band that Mould started after Husker Du.
― pplains, Saturday, March 2, 2013 6:44 PM (eight years ago)

That still makes me laugh--from the Husker Du poll, in response to my general cluelessness about post-Husker projects. (I'm sure there were at least some hardcore Beatles fans in 1970 who had zero interest in solo Beatles music. Would've been infinitely harder to avoid, though.)

Found a sale-bin copy of The Last Dog and Pony Show a couple of weeks ago. I've got this weird thing where I expect new films from my favourite filmmakers to be great, but I approach my favourite musicians warily. Which is counter-intuitive; there are a thousand moving parts to a film, and you'd expect them to be more susceptible to disappointing results.

Seems to be indifference to Dog and Pony thread, and Christgau didn't even review it, but I think it's surprisingly good. The opener, "New #1," is a little ordinary, and "Megamanic," the electronic whatever, is silly, but there isn't another song I don't like at least a little, and there are a few where I get the old Husker Du buzz. My two favourites are "Classifieds" and (especially) "Taking Everything."

Seems to be indifference to Dog and Pony in this thread...

I haven't listened to that and the self-titled album since I mentioned it in this thread in 2009. They're not bad albums but, at the time coming right after Sugar, they never made me love them. Their respective tours were great, though.

Bob has a best-of coming out that I plan to check out. Sometimes pulling key tracks off albums help recontextualize and inspire revisitation.

Dog and Pony was funnily enough the first solo Bob Mould I picked up, after I read a review (and an interview too IIRC) in the Sunday Times.

Ha it was the first (and only) solo Mould I ever bought and I remember really liking it! I hadn’t even heard any Husker Du or Sugar at the time, bought it based off a Big Takeover interview. It’s good though!!

Bob Mould was a disappointment after Sugar's successive triumphs. All I remember are the superb opener with his leaden drumming and "Egoverride."

I think there's a lot to commend on Hubcap - the slow smoulder of Next Time You Leave, the beautiful proggy Hoover Dam vibes of Fort Knox King Solomon, the stop-start harmonics of Art Crisis, the "fuck it I've had enough" tenor of Roll Over And Die.

But yeah, nothing that matches Anytime In Between - I think that's one of his greatest songs, tbh, so bereft and sorrow sodden.

watching his band absolutely kill it right now.

10 Husker Du songs? More?

Holy crap, that's amazing. He did eight at a Brooklyn Steel show several years ago - one of the best shows I've EVER seen - and that seemed like a lot. He only did a few at Webster Hall in 2021 so I thought maybe the uptick was a temporary thing in the wake of Grant's death, but I'm seeing nine at a solo show he did in Dublin back on July 1st. I guess NOW's the time to see him if you want a lot of Dü?

Mould plays Saturday afternoon at Milwaukee's Summerfest - presumably with his band since it doesn't indicate it's a solo show on his website: https://www.summerfest.com/artist/bob-mould

Hmm, actually, maybe just ("just") 9 tonight, too. I want to say he did:

Flip Your Wig
I Apologize
Something I Learned Today
Makes No Sense at All
Celebrated Summer
Chartered Trips
Hate Paper Doll
Never Talking to You Again
Hardly Getting Over it

but I’m seeing nine at a solo show he did in Dublin back on July 1st.

I was there. I didn’t count, and someone nicked the setlist as soon as Bob walked off, but that sounds about right. Mostly HD stuff from Zen Arcade to Candy Apple Grey, and songs from Blue Hearts which actually fit in really well with the older tunes. Plus a few from Sugar and solo.

Last time I saw Bob was the Workbook anniversary retrospective tour. Before that, solo at the Birchmere with Kristin Hersh. He was loud AF, and more than a little cranky.

I admire Bob immensely but I do not think he's great as a solo act. Especially with an electric guitar and nothing else. It's an unforgiving sound.

Ugh

This was with his most recent longstanding cohort Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster. They rock and seem to be having so much fun playing this stuff.

Yeah the trio sound is good! Just don't love him solo quite as much, sorry

I admire Bob immensely but I do not think he's great as a solo act. Especially with an electric guitar and nothing else. It's an unforgiving sound

This is why I passed on his latest (solo electric) tour in these parts - he plays songs like “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” and other stuff originally recorded with acoustic guitars and it just seems to smother any of the subtleties of the original recordings.

It’s nice that he’s dipping into more of the back catalogue but imo it just seems he’s more at ease these days with sticking to a familiar sound and set up rather than exploring his more leftfield journeys of the past

(I might be wrong but it seems like he doesn’t really perform as many solo acoustic shows these days)

It’s nice that he’s dipping into more of the back catalogue but imo it just seems he’s more at ease these days with sticking to a familiar sound and set up rather than exploring his more leftfield journeys of the past

Yeah, and that's why the last few albums and band tours have been good! I've seen him a few times in various formats: Sugar, various solo bands, solo electric (works for Billy Bragg!), solo with drum machines, etc., all behind albums that more or less made no impression at all, and they've all been pretty dull. After I saw him on the Modulate tour - alone on stage with a drum machine, and maybe once or twice a guitar, iirc - I heard a guy after at the merch table and, very politely, he says to the guy behind the table (more or less), "I know this isn't really your job, but I've been a fan for decades and have seen every one of Mould's shows here, but this was terrible and is going to be the last one."

Long and short is that Mould is (go figure) apparently most at ease making the music he's good at, stun-guitar power-trio stuff.

I've seen him twice with his current band and once solo, and I have to agree, it's a lot better with the band. I think he sounded great at his solo show, but at a certain point, it wore a bit thin and I got the impression that it was really hard to sustain an entire set of similarly paced songs with only one raging guitar. (I started thinking about solo acoustic shows and why those were more likely to be great, and virtually every one I enjoyed didn't rely on one guitar either - they usually had accompaniment in spots or the singer mixing it up with a piano and possibly a harmonica.)

xp did Sugar tour for Copper Blue / Beaster? Seems like those shows would have been awesome.

i saw them in november of 94 w velocity girl & magnapop -- it was ok but FU:EL was my least favorite Mould album at that time and there was not nearly enough Beaster content, certainly 0 Dü

the ticket was $10 <3

I’m certain Sugar toured for Copper Blue, yes, and before the release too.

I saw that FU:EL tour, too, and it was a bust, imo. The recordings of earlier Sugar tours sound great.

Also saw that tour and the mix was so loud, all the dynamics were lost. I mean, it was fun to bear the brunt of such a guitar assault but it wasn't satisfying as far as "music" is concerned.

I brought Bob into a commissioned round-up of 2006 dance-related releases, thought there was more but this is it:

Blowoff (Husker Du/Sugar frontman Bob Mould, times DJ Richard Morel), on their amorously armored, self-titled debut, brought shadows into stripe the strobe light. Blowoff summons Bob as Leatherman, dancing like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein surely would have, if only he'd reached the beach.

this is unrelated to live shows but i do have a question --

can anyone explain what is the musical reason that every time I hear "JC Auto" there is a specific point where it sort of morphs into "Poison Years" (mostly the chorus, from BSOR) every time i hear it? Both songs reference Jesus H Christ but aside from that i can't quite figure it out!

for ease of comparison
JC Auto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JacQxqqtbrQ

Poison Years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc-fROR3NN0

sorry it's Workbook not Black Sheets of Rain

I’m certain Sugar toured for Copper Blue, yes, and before the release too.

Yup. I saw (part of) the first Chicago appearance of Sugar, which predated the release of Copper Blue by two months. I mainly went to see openers Scrawl, who played a brilliant set (I was lucky enough to see them again almost exactly a year later, opening for PJ Harvey). But I was also excited to hear Mould’s new band. Three songs in, the realization that Grant Hart was the heart and soul of Hüsker Dü was painfully evident. Sugar wasn’t bad; they were just…there. Standing still. They did not threaten to take off, blow up, or collapse. I was so underwhelmed by the first few songs that I left. Come to find out later they played the Who’s “Armenia City In The Sky” for an encore. Serves me right, I guess.

Anyone pony up for that humongous CD box set Edsel put out of everything "Bob" yet?

xpost

Yeah that was my experience of Sugar too, a more competent ploddy version of HD without any frisson or danger. They played London before Copper Blue came out, supported by Milk and Swallow which I'm sure was a little joke on the part of the promoter, and whelming it was not.

A friend and bandmate of worked sound at some pretty high-end venues in the 90s, and said that Sugar was the absolute loudest act he ever supported. Like, louder than Metallica Slipknot, Gwar; indeed louder than any metal act then in existence.

Personally I have no idea why a song like "If I Can't Change Your Mind" or "See a Little Light" or "Important Years" needs to be the loudest sound in the universe. But evidently it is part of the Mould shtick. Always has been.

can anyone explain what is the musical reason that every time I hear “JC Auto” there is a specific point where it sort of morphs into “Poison Years” (mostly the chorus, from BSOR) every time i hear it? Both songs reference Jesus H Christ but aside from that i can’t quite figure it out!

I don’t have an answer for this, but it does remind me that the start of “Deep Karma Canyon” on the s/t solo album nicks the verse riff from Saccharine Trust’s “A Human Certainty” so he’s probably not beyond recycling musical motifs here and there.

and said that Sugar was the absolute loudest act he ever supported.

I remember reading a Musician magazine rundown of Mould’s amp rig around that time, and it said that his stage volume — just his guitar, without bass or drums — was 128dB.

For comparison, the first Guinness record holder for Loudest Pop Group was the Who at 120dB.

I love Copper Blue more than any HD album. So there's that.

"Copper Blue" still sounds impeccable. Produced with Lou Giordano, who I believe was HD's longtime sound guy.

Oh, and MBV at its loudest usually hovers around 120dB, and has reportedly reached close to 130 at its absolute noise zenith, so it seems unlikely Mould comes close to that. Mould is loud, but it's not disorientingly loud like MBV (and a few others, like Mogwai, High on Fire, etc.)

this is from the FU:EL tour and sounds pretty good to me

(it was also the bonus disc on certain pressings of the 'besides' comp)

(actually saturday)

Bob Mould got married today. 💕 Congrats Bob and Don. pic.twitter.com/3x8fH1qepR

— Roni (@roni1133) May 7, 2023

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fvk2_QNX0AALK1l?format=jpg&name=large

You will lose your mind
When Bob Moulds are two of a kind