Majesty Shredding is the name of the new Superchunk album. Let me borrow that noun for a second: If you don’t understand the majesty of Superchunk, just think about the beautiful operation that is Merge Records and translate it into music. Superchunk are professionals, their business is their pleasure, and Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance must run their band as precisely and proudly as they run their record label, because outwardly both are such smooth and steady enterprises.
But accidents will happen: McCaughan’s guitar didn’t show up at baggage claim on the day of Superchunk’s show at First Avenue. He used the incident as an occasion to mention the hospitality of the people of Minneapolis, and all the local musicians who exchanged e-mails to find him an appropriate replacement guitar for his performance. But what this made me wonder was: How much is at stake in Superchunk’s choice of gear? They are as guitar-centric as any band that ever existed, but does that mean the guitars in their music have as instantly recognizable a timbre as, say, Hüsker Dü’s? I’d argue instead that they have a signature volume and texture: loud and thick.
This is heavy metal, if the term didn’t already mean something else. Solid material went into the making of these sounds. Ballance might have learned technique from Kim Deal, but it always sounds like she’s working with steel cables, not bass strings. If all that guitar starts to muffle the songs’ innate dynamism and good cheer after too much exposure, then McCaughan’s bouncing is a crucial visual component, bringing the gleeful energy back to the surface. Ballance engages in a bit of bouncing too, but McCaughan is simply all over the stage; I’ve never seen a rock guitarist provide such a perfect visual metaphor for his music. Superchunk are professionals, and they are heavy metal. They are also pogo-worthy.
The songs from Majesty Shredding that had their live Minneapolis debut are among the most rip-roaring additions to the band’s catalog since the mid-90s, so the setlist favored the new material and its aesthetic ancestors, early triumphs like No Pocky for Kitty and On the Mouth, and was light on turn-of-the-millennium records like Come Pick Me Up. That 1999 album might be the band’s greatest, but it’s also a bit of an outlier, being the moment when McCaughan totally committed to singing (as opposed to sing-shouting), passing off a dozen rounds of charming melodies with his high croon. He attempted “Hello Hawk” at First Avenue, but the song’s cute fragility isn’t quite compatible with the band’s current victory mode, and its quaintness got smothered in the onslaught.
The lovely new “Learned to Surf” fared better, and I’m inclined to say it’s the greatest reunion song ever written. It’s so sharp, such a greatest hits package rendered new, it almost makes you believe it’s the song you came to hear, so that your investment in the band’s history and in their present become intertwined. And am I correct in assuming that the lyrics take inspiration from the pen of The Thermals’ Hutch Harris, who must also owe Superchunk a thing or two?
Ah, the labyrinths of inspiration. A cover of “Something I Learned Today” during the encore was very welcome and perhaps autobiographical: For a band like Superchunk, the songs of Hüsker Dü must be as elemental as color mixing and traffic rules. Their version blazed until a slip-up at the finish line, when McCaughan carried the refrain one repetition past the last bar of music. He laughed off the mistake, and of course we forgave him, but it was a reminder of how rarely this band goes awry. It’s easy to play a show where mistakes become part of the texture of the music; what this band opts to do instead is very, very hard. They don’t do sadness, they don’t partake in crises. They make music about the pleasures of hard work, and they wouldn’t have returned for any other reason.
Setlist:
Silverleaf & Snowy Tears
Iron On
My Gap Feels Weird
Crossed Wires
The Question Is How Fast
Skip Steps 1 & 3
Like A Fool
Learned To Surf
Hello Hawk
Mower
Digging For Something
Driveway To Driveway
The First Part
Cast Iron
Everything At Once
Throwing Things (Encore)
Something I Learned Today (Encore)
Slack Motherfucker (Encore)
