Bob Mould Record Review

Bob Mould record review, Maintain magazine, March 2002

It’s the ultimate bad-dream scenario: Bob Mould “grows up,” discards the electric for the electronic. Only Bob Mould’s been around long enough to have already “grown up,” shelving the post-punk pique of Hüsker Dü for the more pensive pose that informed Workbook, his first solo effort.

But while the promise of that cello-saturated digression has largely gone unrealized, Mould’s latest detour has, withModulate, only reared its ambivalent head. Mould will release three full-length discs this year, the second of which will be entirely electronic. Modulate is something of a compromise: while it trades heavily in loops and grooves, it offers enough old Mould to not alienate the 41-year-old singer/songwriter’s entire fan base.

With a four-year layoff between The Last Dog and Pony Show, his last record to date, and Modulate, Mould has had ample time to develop a new approach. Of course, to “develop” is not the same as to “perfect.” And Mould, as any sensible artist would, readily concedes the point. “I hope that people approach this work with an open mind,” he states amiably on his website.

Approaching an artist’s work with an open mind is the record reviewer’s first, if too-often neglected, obligation. HearingModulate’s two opening cuts, the vaguely unsettling “180 Rain,” and the unforgivable house-inflected “Sunset Safety Glass,” this reviewer’s instinct was to bolt. But the disc’s third track, the busy, “Semper Fi,” offers compensating virtues — namely a hook and Mould’s signature wall of distorted guitar. More encouragingly, “Semper Fi” gives way to the first of three effective ambient interludes, a sinewy tissue which binds Modulate’s middle passage.

By the standard of every Bob Mould record to precede it, Modulate is half over before it has a proper start, the archetypal “Slay/Sway.” The disc builds on “Slay”’s momentum, cresting with the perfect electric/electronic synthesis, “Come on Strong.” Unfortunately, the disc falters with the two closing cuts, “Trade” and “Author’s Lament,” both of which too strongly evoke Howard Jones, circa 1988 — something no Bob Mould record should ever do.

There is a decidedly schizophrenic tendency at work on Modulate. The tug and pull between old Bob and new Bob threatens at times to undermine the whole tenuous enterprise. And the checks-and-balances system imposed by mingling two distinct musical idioms clearly favors the sometimes empty and impersonal new-Bob sound stylings. But uneven and improbable as the album tends to be, Modulate never sounds desperate, just unconvincing.