Is it weird to call a Superchunk record an elegant one? I suppose so, especially after their last, 2018's incendiary What a Time To Be Alive. And maybe elegant isn't a word we'd reach for when describing many of the North Carolina group's earlier offerings, but the reality is that Wild Loneliness is an elegant album. And it's one which is also neatly precise in spots, even though it's still full of the DIY indie-fire this lot have been running on for more than three decades on Merge.
Opening with Owen Pallett's string arranged "City of the Dead", Wild Loneliness follows the template of 2013's I Hate Music, and even Foolish from the Clinton years, where things are sort of gently eased into gear. And as things kick off with the Teenage Fanclub-assisted, ecologically-minded "Endless Summer", Mac, Jim, Laura, and Jon seem more than ever to be opening themselves up to harnessing the power that collaborators can bring. The guests here give this album a lot of nuance, maybe more than what we found on I Hate Music or Here's To Shutting Up even. Superchunk reportedly recorded this, including, obviously, the guest parts, in separate locales, thanks to the current pandemic, yet you'd almost never realize that. "On The Floor", a highlight here, is a triumph, with Franklin Bruno's piano and Mike Mills' backing vocals doing as much of the heavy lifting of emotions as Mac's lead vocals. The song hits, in its way, as much as anything on Foolish, for example.
That the tunes on Wild Loneliness punch in subtler ways than, say, "The First Part" doesn't matter when the hooks are just as robust and gamely performed. "Refracting", a busy bit of late album business, speaks, it seems, to that which divides us, even as the elegiac "Connection" does its best to rally the spirits. Mac might sing, "Once I had the Spring in me..." as if he's somehow lost it, but the truth is that, with tunes like one, the band's flag-waving for the ideals of American indie is just as constant as it's ever been. And there's ultimately a genuine sense of release with closer "If You're Not Dark", the guitar-lines spiraling around McCaughan's vocals and those of guest Sharon Van Etten in a fashion that recalls for this fan "You Can Always Count On Me (In The Worst Way)" from Come Pick Me Up back in 1999. Similarly, the heft of "This Night", with its gorgeous chorus, owes as much to the hooks crafted by the band as it does to the backing vocals of Tracyanne Campbell (Camera Obscura). The guests on this album don't signal a change in Superchunk's sound as much as the quartet's confidence in exploring new moods.
And while Wild Loneliness finds Superchunk willing to take as many risks as Mac's done with his Portastatic and solo projects, the end result still feels familiar. The hooks and riffs, whatever their forms here in 2022, still sound like Superchunk to me, even if it's more the 'Chunk of "Out of The Sun" than the one of "Punch Me Harder". So, yeah, it's an elegant record, and one which speaks to the resilience of the players and the style. When Mac pleads "Please stay connected with me" on "Connection", it's a bit of uplift in a shitty era. It's also a reminder that this kind of all-American indie, when played with gusto, can still uplift the soul.
Wild Loneliness is out tomorrow on Merge.
[Photo: Brett Villena]