Album Review: Nothing- Guilty of Everything

In talking to one of the head Bearded Gentlemen of the music website that I occasionally contribute reviews to, I used the term “nugaze” in our conversation to quickly describe the Philadelphia based outfit Nothing. He was not familiar with that word, and appropriately “lol’d” at it.

“The scene that celebrates itself,” and the genre “shoegaze,” were, for better or worse, terms created by the music press of the late 1980s and early 90s to describe the sound coming from bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive, amongst others. “Nugaze” is a word I’ve seen casually used on the Internet when people talk about the current crop of contemporary bands that, in a sense, fetishize their copies of Loveless, all while incorporating elements post-punk, alternative rock, dream pop, and noise into their sound.

Okay. Now that we are all caught up on genres, theoretical or otherwise, as well as incredibly important terminology…

Guilty of Everything, the debut full-length from Nothing, is kind of a quintessential “nugaze” record. Owing as much to Gish and Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins as it does to anything released by Creation Records in its heyday, it’s an incredibly heavy, moody, and cinematic sounding album.

Everything is very big on Guilty of Everything—every heavily distorted guitar chord is like a beautiful wave crushing down on you. An outstanding example of this arrives early on with the track “Dig,” as well as in the slow-motion majesty of “Endlessly.”

In the true sense of “shoegaze,” frontman Domenic Palermo’s whispery, spidery vocals are not so much buried in the mix, but are very distant sounding, drenched in a healthy coating of reverb. Musically, though, everything is rather well balanced, the drums providing a nice raw sounding punch behind the fury of the guitars.

Palermo has quite a past—both musically and personally. Personally, he did a bid of two years for aggravated assault when he was a member of the hardcore punk band Horror Show. And it’s that punk aggression that shows through in the well-balanced juxtaposition between beauty and brutality.

As a whole, Nothing are slightly heavier sounding than their contemporaries and former tour mates Whirr—though they do share an overall similar aesthetic. On Guilty of Everything, by focusing on that heavy side of shoegaze, they lose a bit of the accessibility that Whirr has in their poppier moments. But, even in all that noise, Nothing can also be incredibly melodic—“Bent Nail” is a very uptempo, pop-punk song dressed up with more distortion. And when listening to Guilty of Everything, there were moments when I was reminded of bands that I listened to a lot in a past life—The Juliana Theory came to mind more than once. Obviously not as emo, but similar levels of emotion, if that even makes any sense at all.

I stop short of saying that Nothing are a “new” band or a “young” band. Palermo has been putting together music under this moniker for three years, and it was on the strength of 2012s Downward Years to Come, as well as their association with Whirr, that I first took notice. This idea—“nugaze”—or whatever you even want to call it, is certainly not a new idea, but rather than be derivative or phone it in, Nothing have crafted a rather refreshing take on this subgenre within a genre, if you will, and Guilty of Everything, aside from being a solid debut LP, is incredibly listenable, as well as capable of being quite powerful at times.

Guilty of Everything is available now via Relapse Records, and you can also stream the whole thing on the band's own Bandcamp site.