On their fourth album The Great Dismal, Philadelphia shoegaze outfit Nothing triumph with both bold and subtle sounds. The band have always excelled at details and dynamics, and they deliver here without fail. The final passages of opening track “A Fabricated Life” really cement the album’s prodigious and intimate themes: “Long before the fall / Did we have it all along? / Sing the same old songs / Beat the same old tired drum / But what else can I ask for? / I’m nauseous from the ride / Degeneration in the wind / A fabricated life.” These moods of erosion, numbness and uncertainty pervade the album, and their mythical soundscapes bolster the weight of these feelings and elevate their sense of urgency.
The Great Dismal watches as humanity is put through the wringer and responds with godlike, pummelling guitars and metaphorical, emotionally revealing lyrics. One minute, they’re contemplating themes of love, reason, perception and death on a grand scale, and in simple terms, and the next, they’re marvelling at people’s reaction to rain (“Isn’t it strange / Watching people / Try and outrun rain”). It’s a sweltering expulsion of anxieties and a thoughtful chronicling of our species’ downfall.
Nothing return with their highly anticipated new full-length, The Great Dismal. Recorded entirely during quarantine, The Great Dismal explores existentialist themes of isolation, extinction, and human behaviour in the face of 2020’s vast wasteland. The Great Dismal came out October 30th on LP/CD/CS/Digital via Relapse Records.
Philadelphia rock band Nothing has a way of putting words and sounds to the rock-bottom moments in life. Consider the title of their wide-eyed and beautiful fourth album—The Great Dismal and see if you can think of a better way to sum up the combination of slow heartbreak, frustrated ambition, and deadening boredom that took up so much of our emotional bandwidth this year. In their best moments, Nothing does us one better, taking these states of psychic purgatory and blowing them up widescreen, so that they feel pregnant with a significance that is hard to put into language but also darkly addicting.
On The Great Dismal, which they recorded during the first few weeks of the pandemic, they let the guitars do a lot of the talking; from the wailing bends on the “April Ha Ha” to the shimmering, oceanic tones on “Blue Mecca,” the shoegaze influence is more apparent than ever, rendered with a clarity of signal that makes every texture pop. Even frontman Domenic “Nicky” Palermo’s voice sounds more feathery than usual, which somehow makes his words cut even closer to the bone when he startles us with a line like “Trapped / In skin that fits me / But never fit me / Was never mine.”
The thing I love about Nothing and their new album The Great Dismal is you don’t know what to expect as each song takes a different twist and turn. Are they Godflesh, The Cocteau Twins, Rorschach… what the fuck is this? Every time I listen and think I have it figured out they switch moods making it a brand new record spinning in a swan dive from your mind into your soul. While I don’t advocate drugs, Nothing makes one appreciate hallucinogens while braving a new flight. The first single off the album, “Say Less,” is a great introduction to what you’re about to receive, and it’s only available on widescreen.
The Fat Angel Sings 