Album Of The Week: Superchunk I Hate Music

Superchunk don't hate music. We know this. The North Carolina band have been making it for more than two decades, and the music that they've made has way too much joy and desperation and impossible need in it for them to have anything but the most fervent love for the stuff. And then there's the fact that band members Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, as Merge Records co-founders, get paid everytime anyone buys an Arcade Fire record, and that drummer Jon Wurster has a nice little sideline going, playing drums for anyone who could possibly ever need drums played. It would be ridiculous for them to hate music. They are, however, old enough to know that music, for all its vast and inexplicable power, cannot solve all of your problems, and it cannot heal some of the deepest aches in your heart. Before reading the press around I Hate Music, the band's new album, I'd never heard of David Doernberg, the artist/filmmaker and friend of the band, who died of cancer last year. But his passing, his absence, absolutely shoots through the LP; it's practically a concept album about coping with loss, or failing to cope with loss. It's an album about reflexively looking around for your friend's face when you walk into the bar, and then quickly realizing that you're never going to see your friend's face again. And the band delivers that sentiment with all the force and power and even joy that they've ever brought to their music -- which, titles aside, suggests that there may be something to this music thing after all.