Superchunk, Majesty Shredding

review by dave heaton

Going nine years without an album and still sounding like yourself, and not a pale simulacrum, is itself an achievement. On Majesty Shredding it sounds like Superchunk is picking up where they left off, seamlessly, while also channeling the excitement of regrouping into an almost entirely high-energy album. The emphasis is on fast guitars and harmonies.

The songs where they slow down somewhat, like the string-laden “Fractures in Plaster” and “Rosemarie”, sound the most like Mac Macaughan’s more recent Portastatic stuff, with hints of Springsteen and Waits, a reminder of that music’s strength, and that Superchunk’s members haven’t all been absent from the music scene.

The album’s energy seems an emotional urging, a search, an act of “Digging for Something” (to quote one song title) – as it always has. That yearning that so many ‘emo’ bands built their music on feels fairly absent from hip indie-rock these days, though, which makes Superchunk’s high-intensity, high-melody rock still refreshing. The final song strikes me as summing up this whole pop-music endeavor, and the obsession so many of us share, by getting at the way it means so much and so little at the same time: “Here is a song about nothing / and everything at once.”

{www.mergerecords.com}