Superchunk, What a Time to Be Alive

I was skeptical, it’s true. When I read the initial press about famed indie-rock band Superchunk’s latest release, What a Time to Be Alive, proclaiming it was the band’s best album ever, or at the very least, in more than 20 years, I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow — “yeah, right. Here we go…”

And yet, goddamn it, those writeups were absolutely freaking spot-on. While yes, I have liked the band’s past few releases, particularly 2010’s Majesty Shredding, which has a sweet, warm feel to it, there hasn’t been a Superchunk album I’ve loved since 1995’s Here’s Where the Strings Come In, which is one of the small handful of albums I can listen to all the damn way through and not skip a single song.

Until now, that is. What a Time to Be Alive is easily the best thing singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan, singer/bassist Laura Ballance, guitarist Jim Wilbur, and drummer Jon Wurster have done as a band in 20 goddamn years, and it’s amazing to behold. There’s a vibrancy, an energy to this album that’s been missing for the past several albums, a blazing fury that points backwards to the band’s punk roots more so than anything since, hell, 1993’s On the Mouth, maybe.

So what’s sparked the change? Well, to put it bluntly, the Trump Administration and its assorted hangers-on. From all reports, the band watched in horror as the country slid steadily Trump-ward in 2016 and 2017, and primary songwriter McCaughan channeled that horror into the music in the best way possible. Despite the ever-present melodies, the songs spill over with bitter vitriol, sarcasm, disbelief, and straight-up, fist-in-the-air outrage.

It’s interesting, really, because for most of its life, Superchunk has been a band that focused pretty strictly on the personal — the songs are all about love, heartbreak, childhood, growing up, traveling, stupid-ass people, friendship, and all the spaces in-between. Even now, I look at Foolish as a textbook-perfect example of a “falling-in-love” album, and Here’s Where the Strings Come In serves as the best soundtrack to a breakup you’re likely to find.

McCaughan and company sang and played songs about driving, mowing lawns, hanging out, and getting in arguments. If they ever touched on politics, it was in the most oblique way possible, so obscure I can’t remember it for the life of me.

Maybe what this says, though, is that these days politics are personal, possibly more so than ever before. We’ve got a President whose minute-to-minute thoughts are blasted out to the world via Twitter, a media that seems to alternate between brief spasms of muted anger and “measured” well-everybody-does-this equivocating, real-life freaking Nazis marching in the streets, kids walking out of schools to protest for stricter gun regulations, school districts spiraling down the toilet, convicted felons running for Congress, and any idea that politicians should be held to the highest standard of ethics and behavior tossed out the window.

When I was a kid, politicians weren’t like my friends and family — agree or disagree with what they said, they were smart (mostly, anyway) people who thought seriously about the impact their actions could have, because they knew they were playing with live ammo. Now, on the other hand, politicians are laid bare on TV and online, fallible, often broken human beings that have no more qualifications to be in office than the guy who restocks the toilet paper in the office bathroom.

So maybe it’s appropriate that the album’s opener, title track “What a Time to Be Alive,” is the most ripped-open raw and bitter I’ve heard McCaughan sound since the aforementioned breakup of Strings — he’s just exchanged a broken relationship for a broken government, this time around.

Naturally, that wouldn’t matter much if the band couldn’t back it up, but holy shit they do. The song is a fiery, snarling, insistent, halfway tongue-in-cheek blast of stomping rock fury; it’s immediately clear who it is the band’s aiming at (hint: he sits in the Oval Office at least some of the time), and it’s an awesome, awesome thing to see.

“Break the Glass” is equally intense, albeit with a sly smirk off to one side and the best damn harmony vocals I think I’ve ever heard from McCaughan and Ballance. Superchunk are seemingly warning the listener not to just run for the hills, as a whole lot of people out there have tried/wanted to do, physically or mentally, but to sit tight and sound the alarm.

Throughout What a Time to Be Alive, there’s this feeling of bewildered wonderment, like Superchunk are looking around and saying, “really? You’re not kidding, this is for real?” “Lost My Brain” makes it pretty plain right from the start, a raw-throated spasm of anger and disbelief at what’s been going on around us.

The slower, more melodic “Erasure,” which almost has a New Wave tinge to it, comes off to me like a condemnation of the modern media culture, where something stated as fact one day can be blithely shrugged off or ignored a day later, facts that don’t fit the narrative are dismissed as “fake news,” and reality is whatever we’re told it is at any given moment. When McCaughan sings about how empathy’s been weaponized, it’s like a punch to the gut.

I mentioned the band’s punk past above, and it’s definitely in evidence here, particularly on the speeding, full-tilt blast of “Cloud of Hate,” which makes me think of classic track “Precision Auto” more than anything off any more recent releases. (And yeah, you can probably guess, again, who the song’s aimed at.) On “All for You,” McCaughan gets downright confrontational, yelling, “Fight me / I don’t like to get hit but / fight me,” and yeah, I get that. Some days it feels like a fight is pretty justified.

Then there’s “Reagan Youth,” a shout-out to the iconic ’80s hardcore band that McCaughan testifies “taught you how to feel,” while acknowledging that the band couldn’t stay the way they started out. There’s a hint of sadness to it, a little note of regret that lodges in your chest when you hear it, making you remember that youth doesn’t last forever, and the real world always intrudes.

Closer “Black Thread” runs along similar lines, more thoughtful and somber than most of the rest of What a Time to Be Alive, although there’s still a nice, Hüsker Dü-style buzz to it. The band gets back to a bit more of that aforementioned obliqueness here, but even still, it’s melancholy and resigned and feels like an elegy for a simpler, smarter, less-insane time. What a time to be alive, indeed.