Bob Mould: Classic or Dud?

eh, disagree. Those albums are as good as FUEL IMO.

he had a dj residency in San Francisco, I believe

Don't want to dox him but I occasionally see him in the park walking his dog. He's absolutely nondescript and blends in like a regular joe. I keep meaning to ask his thoughts re: my pet theory on how he invented shoegaze* but I wouldn't want to "out" him/creep him out, and most of the time I'm running after my kid.

*HÜSKER PÖLL: Warehouse - Songs and Stories

I don't think he'd have any issues talking to you about things, I've heard he's perfectly friendly. I didn't realize he was still living here.

eh, disagree. Those albums are as good as FUEL IMO

Imo (and I think this quite a common opinion) FUEL was his weakest album to that point in his career. I felt he was treading water, sonically and, to an extent, in the songwriting. Like, that point in the late 90s where he talks of being sick of loud guitars, *that* album always sounded like he was ready to hang it up (even though it happened a few years later)

Tbh I hear quite a bit of that album in the recent stuff, guitar tone included; it feels like stuff he could do in his sleep; some of it is great, but I feel myself paying more attention when he changes things up in a more dynamic sense - Workbook after the Husker split, Beaster after Copper Blue, even Modulate (even if we knew at the time that changes were afoot)

Even Copper Blue - although it kept the guitars - was tonally a 180 from the relative murk of Black Sheets of Rain

Bob profiled by Stevie.

Interesting interview. I still haven't listened to Blue Hearts yet though

Oh, Guardian interview above with its discussion of the reconciliation with Grant discussed on Husker Du thread

Husker Du : Classic or Dud, Search and Destroy.

parts of the new album sound quite superchunk, which probably isn't too surprising considering he's using their rhythm section and he's an obvious inspiration

dude is prolific as hell. also he's gonna turn 60 in a couple weeks, which i am perhaps not ready to contemplate

WTF at that Bad Brains note.

New album is terrific. That and the new PE made a righteous angry 1-2 playing them back to back.

Bad Brains were notorious homophobes, it’s been written about a lot; AFAIK they’ve renounced that stance and behaviour of the time in recent years, which is something.

I didn’t know that Mould visited Hart before he died; that brought more than a tear to my eye.

Not sure which thread I posted it on but...

There's a pretty big free concert here every early autumn that's folk/bluegrass-focused but also draws in artists from all sorts of genres/pockets of music.

In 2017 shortly after Grant died, Bob Mould was playing one of the 5 stages and while we were walking by (we hadn't committed to watching anything as we had a young babby with us), he opened his set with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cejMKLwT-Y

bob mould turns 60 today

happy birthday to bob!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA_pPgwguR8

These are his important years

Compositions For The Young And Old

Heh

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.