“Life Without Sound” is the fourth studio album from Cloud Nothings, an indie rock quartet out of Cleveland, Ohio.
The band started as the creative vision of a teenager named Dylan Baldi, who recorded the project’s debut, “Cloud Nothings,” alone in 2010. Later he enlisted the help of three bandmates and cranked out the group’s sophomore effort, “Attack On Memory.”
“Life Without Sound,” available on January 27, serves as a slight departure from Cloud Nothings’ usual lo-fi pop sound. The new record is more polished and less intrusive than the band’s two previous albums, making it their most radio-friendly production to date. Overall, “Life” is less punk and more pop.
The piano-laden opener “Up to the Surface” signals a modest change in Baldi’s song writing, from raw and emotional to thoughtful and melodic. It’s not until the album’s fourth track, “Darkened Rings,” that Cloud Nothings returns to the unrefined energy of its earlier work. That same energy is echoed by Baldi’s vocal performance on “Strange Year,” while the song’s instrumentation uncovers one of the band’s many inspirations — noise rock.
At the same time, tracks like “Enter Entirely” and “Modern Act” border on pop-punk, and the chorus of “Internal World” could have easily been written(and performed) by Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day.
In short, “Life Without Sound” is just under 40 minutes of not-so-lo-fi indie rock. Lyrically, the album is introspective, though musically, “Life” brings little new to the table.
Cloud Nothings is a band evolving with each new record — on their fourth, the group holds true to the quick, distorted progressions of their earlier work while both tightening production and learning the value of a good hook.