Other experiments fare better. The lightly baroque pop of “the rain don’t care” starts like John Lennon trying to write a Paul McCartney song and landing on Oasis. Palermo sings the melody like it’s a tangled necklace he’s patiently picking apart. He moves delicately, stepping around the columns of piano chords keeping the song upright. On “purple strings,” he sounds like he’s been awake for days, his voice thin and sapped of energy; he delivers the line “I’m getting to know myself” with such despondence he doesn’t need to tell you how little he likes what he sees. Mary Lattimore’s harp spangles the background, while Camille Getz drags her violin across the track, a clever acoustic rendering of a classic shoegaze guitar squeal. While Palermo’s grainy vocals blow through the excellent “ballet of the traitor,” a sticky guitar that could’ve been pulled from a Tears for Fears B-side keeps him tacked down. None of these songs is revolutionary; there are no sounds in “nerve scales” you haven’t heard elsewhere, though you may not have heard them on a previous Nothing record. But the conviction with which they’re played and the positioning of Palermo’s voice—the emotional north star—in relation to the surrounding music allows the band to find a new kind of transcendence.
Part of what made Nothing’s early records so powerful was discipline. The guitarists played with military precision and sangfroid, using volume and distortion to blow the listener back instead of chaotic fretwork and tremolo bends; the interplay of dark guitar and light vocal was as high contrast as a xeroxed punk flyer. On “cannibal world,” it all blends together in an indistinct mash of glide guitar and mumbled singing. A drum’n’bass breakbeat spices the song up a bit, but it lacks the propulsion and dance-music logic that makes Nuclear Daisies’ break-gaze so compelling. A distant piano and screeching counter-riff shade the title track’s monochrome wash, deepening the howling noise into a kind of crestfallen sigh, but all the clashing overtones turn the rest of the song into a nauseated blur. It works, but anyone who’s spent any time with Loveless knows that it’s always worked. Nothing might perfectly recreate an admittedly breathtaking tone, but they lose their personality in the process.
a short history of decay shares a name with a 1949 book by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, which is, indeed, a short history of how decay seeps into human institutions and civilization at large to become their defining characteristic. Cioran was, to put it lightly, a pessimist, but he found a kind of hope in destruction; when rot is allowed to run its course, the rotten object is no more, and something new and more fully alive can be built in its place. Of course, every new thing is built from the raw material of the old, so in a certain sense, nothing really goes away—it just gets transfigured. For a band that uses its biggest moment in the spotlight to upend the sound that got it there, it’s a clever metaphor. With a short history of decay, Nothing have begun to build something fresh and exciting; it’s a shame they didn’t finish clearing the rot first.
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