Records: Superchunk's Indoor Living

By Jessica Winter

They've never produced an album that couldn't have been called, as critic Rob Sheffield so memorably posited, More Songs About Paying Back College Loans and Breaking Up With My College Girlfriend. But Super-chunk have earned a lasting place in all but the most cynical indie-rock hearts, largely due to their own keen understanding of the narrow ground where that place is staked. One cranks up a Superchunk record to hear them upend their seldom-varying bag of tricks: Mac McCaughan's guitars are bottom-heavy while Jim Wilbur's are reedy, almost oboeish, like McCaughan's voice. That dynamic leaves plenty of sonic space for Laura Ballance's bass and Jon Wurster's drums to kick up a row; both play their instruments like an adolescent Bam-Bam might. Cough up 12 bucks for some 'Chunk and you want two things in exchange: 45 minutes of vaguely ornate, passive-aggro-pop songs which tend to smear together a bit--self-aware as always, Superchunk's BMI imprint is All the Songs Sound the Same Music--and one tune that really, really, really rawks. Superchunk had "Slack Motherfucker," Foolish tendered "The First Part," and Here's Where the Strings Come In offered not one but two raucous classics of the "I hate you, but call me" school of songwriting: "Hyper Enough" and "Yeah, It's Beautiful Here Too." Ave Maria.

Superchunk's latest, Indoor Living, meets all prior expectations, but does so with more asymmetrical, more expansive, more richly textured songs than can be found on their earlier albums. McCaughan and company are experimenting with song structure while keeping in mind that verse-chorus-verse still pays the bills, starting with "Unbelievable Things," an intriguingly murky, cluttered, muddled micro-epic. Mac lays his twee-est sensitive-boy voice over all the mumbling three-chord orchestration; the effect is of a drag Alice struggling to keep her dress clean amidst the slithy toves.

The 'Chunksters can't really muster any sense of malice, but would we really want them to? Better that they channel any runoff angst into something like the chiming, taut "Song for Marion Brown"; the track is like a clenched fist sheathed in a velvet glove. That tension detonates in "Nu Bruises," which wins Superchunk's latest Killer Pogo Grab-Your-Air-Guitar Song title by several lengths: the machine gun-precision drumming and the rollicking, yet frangible, guitars combine in a diamond-hard admixture.

"Nu Bruises" does lack a certain anthemic quality that characterizes many of the highlights from the Superchunk catalog, mostly because McCaughan's voice is pushed back further in the mix than is usual. It's too bad--there are few more satisfying moments in whine-pop than Mac's pissy rant "Last year, last night, I'm tired, let's fight!" on "Yeah, It's Beautiful Here Too"--but the deemphasized vocals and, by extension, lyrics underline the fact that there is simply more going on aurally during Indoor Living than is usual. Take "Every Single Instinct," which may well be the most beautiful, most organic song Superchunk have ever penned. With McCaughan and Wilbur's guitars tuned down so far you could play cat's cradle with their strings, and a mix so treble-y as to fluster even Robert Pollard, "Every Single Instinct" has the same cinematic, dense-yet-fragile texture that the first two Galaxie 500 albums so gorgeously cultivated.

The crucial difference is, while Galaxie's Dean Wareham always sang to himself, McCaughan is singing to you. With Indoor Living, Superchunk have struck a difficult balance between maintaining an active dialogue with their listener and the baggage of his or her expectations, and continuing to expand their sonic palette. Their language is the same, only the vocabulary keeps growing. Superchunk, it seems, have finally graduated, but we can rest easy that they haven't left us behind.

Back to A & E...