By: Matt Stevens
Bob Mould | website | facebook |
Support: Thought Forms | website
Bob Mould has a catalogue of songs with few rivals. In his set at the Brooklyn Bowl he played a decent selection of the Sugar/Husker Du/solo classics alongside strong new material from his recent albums.
Before Bob’s set Thought Forms played a set of lovely shoegazey tunes . They were fighting a poor sound but there were some really interesting moments and quality songs. I’d like to hear more, it sounded like there were some interesting guitar moments buried in the mix alongside some really nice vocals.
Bob walks on to great applause straight into a trio of Husker Du songs. It’s immediately apparent that his current live band have a power that a reformed Husker Du that would unlikely able to muster. Drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy (both of Superchunk) are both powerful and energetic and Narduncy adds strong harmony vocals.
One thing that’s great to see as he moves into material from the classic Sugar album Copper Blue is how much Mould is enjoying himself, he’s smiling throughout the set. This is very different to his onstage persona from the 90’s and it’s so good to see him happy playing this joyous music.
Some people may criticise the set for it’s lack of tonal variation but when you have songs as strong as this using similar sounds from song to song really doesn’t matter. When they play ‘Come Around’ from Beaster with Mould using a Freeze pedal on the guitar to get the shoegazing sounds he used on the record it’s unexpected and a true wall of sound.
One thing to note is that this an artist who can still write songs as good as he did with Husker Du or Sugar. A lot of the set is built around material from his last three solo albums, the man’s compositional skills are still fully intact. The new material is still raging and melodic in a way that only Bob can do.
Mould encores with a rarely played song that should have been a hit in the late 80’s, ‘Could You Be The One’ from Husker Du’s Warehouse Songs. He beams as he make a tiny error in the guitar solo. It’s easy to forget that he’s also a really original and unusual guitar player who’s style fuses US Hardcore and folky strumming and chord voicings.
This was a great set from one of the best songwriters of the last thirty years. That he didn’t play ‘Tilted’, ‘Celebrated Summer’, ‘Hardly Getting Over It’, ‘Wishing Well’ etc etc in his set (songs many bands would build an entire career around if they had written) and still played a set devoid of dull moments says a lot about the sheer volume of great tracks he’s written.
