New York – Everybody’s talking about Nothing, about how they’re Philly’s best shoegaze band, and how they’re dark and beautiful and heavy and sad but very cool. Well, yeah. Nothing is all of that. Today the four-piece releases their debut LP, Guilty of Everything, on Relapse, a record that takes themes of serious pain and just crushes it so hard that it feels good. Formed by Domenic Palermo, past frontman of hardcore punk cult band Horror Show, after some jail time and soul searching, Nothing builds on themes of loss, isolation, and numbness through the eyes of experience and distills it all into devastatingly brilliant songs that are also loud enough to make your head implode.
After seeing Nothing live this past fall, it was clear their wall of sound went deep, and the band was everything it was projecting. Guilty of Everything starts off much like their live show, with softly searching vocals that turn into a harmony, with the second guitar line sneaking in at the same time. Then the bass drops, the feedback screeches, then the wall falls down. This begins with opener “Hymn to the Pillory,” that gradually builds to the brims and ends with the lyrical imagery of a pendulum swinging violently and the words “Please come down on me.” The whole album comes down on your ears and sinks deeper into your head from there, but the thing about having seen them live first, is that now with the album I keep wanting to turn it up louder, but it’s never enough.
The upside to this is that the poetic vocals are mixed more evenly, and the harmonies between Palermo and vocalist/guitarist Brandon Setta have this amazing balance that lends a gorgeously unsettling texture. On single “Dig,” this helps give more weight to both the arrangement and meaning. Same goes for “Beat Around the Bush,” and title track “Guilty of Everything,” that further the understanding of ways to cope with living a hard life. “I’ve given up. I’m guilty of everything,” Palermo sings. With “Get Well,” Setta takes lead, looking for a place to escape the proverbial rain, “But I can’t find it” he repeats.
For other tracks, like the slow-burning rocker “Endlessly,” it’s more about the feeling created with the mounting feedback, buzzsaw guitar solos, and the pounding of the drums, like the pounding of the infinite sun. This track goes straight into “Somersault,” that begins with the fleeting feeling of floating, but in true Nothing fashion, when it all hits, it hits good. “B&E” is another track that careens wildly at the end before shredding out to an abrupt halt, like being woken up from a crazy dream. Guilty of Everything is a heavy and depressing album, but the way it’s all poured out feels really good. There’s always some amount of beauty within sadness, and Nothing acknowledges hard truths with melancholic grace. With this collection of songs, Nothing is perfect. Go ahead and marinate on that.
