Cloud Nothings

If you’ve never experienced the eerie gloom of a city like Cleveland at the height of the recession, you might instead check out a Cloud Nothings performance. If you have, you’ll find it unsurprising how such a band — the project of 20-year-old singer/guitarist Dylan Baldi — could emerge from such a gutted metropolitan area. Cloud Nothings’ straight-ahead, guitar-driven post-punk rock blows most of today’s crop of boring chillwave bands out of their effects-saturated, glowstick-stirred standing water. Characterized by a sense of aggression tempered with genuine excitement, the band’s 2012 album Attack on Memory is a crafty existential response to the bleakness that overlays our country’s washed-out Rust Belt region. Baldi screams into an expanding void swallowing up the American middle class about futility, directionlessness, and feeling like he could be more than he is. Watch the video for “No Future/No Past” for a brilliant satire of a middle-class career man. (Saturday, 1:45-2:30, Red Stage) –text: Brendan Dabkowski