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Bob Mould has spent a substantial amount of time looking back recently. In 2011, he released a revealing and candid autobiography. The next year brought expanded reissues of his work with Sugar. In 2013, Mould kickstarted a concert video that featured rock luminaries paying tribute to him and his body of work. Earlier this year, he toured behind a 25th anniversary reissue of Workbook, his first solo record.
Amidst all this reminiscing was an album of new material, 2012’s Silver Age, hailed at the time as a blistering return to form. Silver Age’s relentless barrage of adrenaline and aggression brought inevitable comparisons to Hüsker Dü and Sugar. Mould’s newest album, Beauty & Ruin, will likely do the same, but whereas Silver Age seemed like another manifestation of Mould’s newfound sense of nostalgia, Beauty & Ruin opts instead to make sense of Mould’s legacy as a way to build upon it.
One constant in Mould’s career has been his proclivity to group songs together in what he calls “packets.” In Hüsker Dü, for example, “Standing in the Rain,” “Back from Somewhere,” and “Ice Cold Ice” were typically performed as a mini set. Later, the first three songs of Copper Blue would constitute such a packet for Mould. Beauty & Ruin finds Mould extending this practice across an entire album, creating a narrative arc across twelve songs that begins with the brooding “Low Season” and concludes with the ebullient, energetic “Fix It.”
The fulcrum on which the album turns is the interplay between two songs: “The War” and “Forgiveness.” Mould’s sometimes turbulent, often complex relationship with his father was well documented in his autobiography. On “The War,” Mould openly processes his father’s recent death, and when the song’s buried vocal emerges at the end of the song from the suffocating layers of dense guitarwork, the pain is left behind, concluding the album’s rumination on loss.
“Forgiveness,” in contrast, throws open the windows and lets in the air. Here, the influences don’t sound like Hüsker Dü (“Kid with Crooked Face”) or Sugar (lead single “I Don’t Know You Anymore”) but the bands Hüsker Dü and Sugar influenced. The track knocks the record temporarily off its moorings, untethered to the familiar touchstones reliably present in the album’s first half. It’s a brief departure from Mould’s hallmark sound, but its inclusion is significant. By allowing newer music to continue to influence him, Mould shows himself to be more than just an important artist, he’s a relevant artist, one with something left to say: in this case, that beauty follows ruin, forgiveness comes after the war, and looking back is sometimes the best way to move forward again.
