Featured Essay: Cloud Nothings - Turning On

by Trevor Zaple

By Trevor Zaple

Shopping for vinyl is a habit that, primarily, has you working like an old-timey prospector panning for gold in California in the middle of the 19th Century. Picture it: I’m deep in the musty innards of a vintage and antique mall in London, Ontario. Tucked away in the corner, near the washrooms, is a little nook that mostly sells old Coke signs, teacups, and commemorative plates. Hidden behind a shelf of dusty old tumblers in the corner – the very back corner of the mall – are records. 

Most of these are the same stuff you find in pretty much every used record booth across Ontario. There’s a lot of Robert Palmer, Bob Seger, Loverboy, all the Styx you could ever want, and a plethora of one-offs and also-rans. Flipping through it becomes trance-inducing. ABC bleeds into the Captain and Tennille so fast you start to wonder if there’s anything worthwhile at all. Then, suddenly, you flip down the very last Chicago record and there it is: a copy of Turning On, the first album recorded by a very young and very DIY Dylan Baldi as Cloud Nothings in the early Obama era. 

Cloud Nothings is a band out of Cleveland that scored a (relatively) big hit with Attack On Memory in 2012 on the strength of one of the most untouchable three-song runs of the 2010s: the sprawling “Wasted Days” setting up the one-two punch of “Fall In” and “Stay Useless.” I spent a great deal of time in that long-ago year trying to make a living fixing computers and while I fixed computers I listened to Attack On Memory a lot. It was probably the Steve Albini production that lured me in – it always seemed to work – but Baldi’s deft balance of radio-ready melody and pure scathing destruction is what kept me around. Their follow-up, 2014’s Here And Nowhere Else was basically the same thing (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it) and since then, they’ve been at minimum solid, if occasionally brilliant. Their most recent album, April’s Final Summer, is on my recommendation list for this year. 

Turning On showcases why people cared about Dylan Baldi in the first place. Written as a freshman at Case Western and recorded in his parent’s basement around 2009, it began as an exercise near and dear to my heart: making fake bands and populating social media pages with music for them. The music for “Cloud Nothings” caught people’s attention, though, and Baldi made good on that original promise with Turning On. It’s a collection of raw, punk-inflected noise pop, slashing incisively and setting fires while also being undeniably catchy as hell. You can still hear its ghost in later Cloud Nothings recordings. Turning On is basically the core version of the idea of the band, distilled to its essence. They’ve lost some of that raw noise over the years, although the catchiness hasn’t diminished. Much like early Car Seat Headrest records, it’s recorded very lo-fi. The big guitar moments that show up on later Cloud Nothings’ records are buried deep in the mix here, even with some presumable cleanup for the anniversary re-release. It’s commercially anti-commercial, something it shares with a lot of Guided By Voices releases as well.

Alongside early Car Seat Headrest and pre-1997 GBV, it’s also reminiscent of single-performer black metal bands, the kind that have popped up in recent years like mushrooms. Both Baldi at 18 and the likes of Mare Cognitum, Spectral Lore, and Thy Catafalque walk a thin line of artistry: the need to be perceived warring with the desire to not. Collectively, it’s music that obscures much more than it reveals, preferring layers of interference and noise to cover the small moving parts of every song, to make them akin to an act of digging to find them. If you listen closely, for example, there is a guitar solo near the back end of “Water Turns Back,” but if you listen superficially, such moments are lost. The music flows over and around you, and you sometimes miss the little flecks of precious metal within. It’s gold-panning music that approximates the act of crate-digging in the first place. You flip and flip, as the water rushes, bland and blameless. Then, from the current: a sparkle of yellow, a searing riff played on a Fender in a basement, an album sticking out where it shouldn’t be. 

Incidentally, I didn’t recognize the album’s cover when I flipped past it originally, and my first thought was that there must have been some obscure ‘80s band that was also named Cloud Nothings. Then I flipped it over and saw “Hey Cool Kid,” the song that became a darling of the critical blog set in 2010, arguably the peak year of music blogs. Forget the endless copies of Dan Fogelberg records: There be gold in them thar hills.

My inability to recognize the cover was, naturally, because it is Carpark Records’ 2021 anniversary re-release. The original cover is a slanted photograph of someone climbing out of a washing machine while another person stands near in a dress, mostly out of frame. The re-release features a very anonymous shot of a tree against a blue sky with a couple of wispy white clouds. It blends in exceedingly well with four-decade old detritus, and I think that’s the reason it almost got lost along with it, and also probably why I only ended up paying $10 for it. It’s the sort of score that leads me to poke through every crate and spill of records I come across – there’s a lot of mud in the river, but once in a while the glimmer of pure gold shines through.

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Trevor James Zaple is a writer and web developer for an educational non-profit organization. His work has appeared with Scary Mommy, Nightmare On Film Street, and Pif Magazine, as well as a host of fiction outlets. He lives in the other London with his wife, daughters, dog, and a family of strange cats. A full list of his work as well as ongoing thoughts on music can be found at TrevorZaple.com.