Send "Superchunk " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 In certain key ways, Superchunk's Foolish perfectly sums up what made so much early-1990s indie rock so great. It was rambunctious enough for kids who craved the caffeinated buzz of punk rock at its catchiest. It was also tender enough for kids who loved hearing their own human-sized romantic foibles reflected in indie's everyperson approach to the love song. Foolish can be plenty fast and plenty noisy, but it skips the meathead aggression that's a nasty side effect of so much fast and noisy music. It's unafraid of getting down to personal angst, but smart enough not to get all gross and mawkish about it. It was made by a group who could have walked off stage and gone to their day jobs without having to change out of their Rock Band costumes. These are the kind of songs about bad breakups, worse parties, and lonely walks home that you and three of your friends might have written.Except you probably wouldn't have, or couldn't have. Like a lot of early-90s indie music, Foolish still projects a D.I.Y. spirit, a welcoming vibe of accessibility, community, small-scale ingenuity. But there's nothing about the album that really says "anyone can do this." In fact, it still sounds like a major statement, albeit one from a self-effacing band. You knew from "Slack Motherfucker" that Superchunk would not be destined to play college-town gigs for a couple of years and then disappear. They were just more driven than the bulk of their contemporaries, a work ethic that's pretty obvious from at least album no. 2 onward. You don't come up with that many intense and memorable choruses, or play that tight, thanks to luck. And while they had an anti-pretentious streak that was a godsend in the messianic years of grunge, Foolish is where the band's ambition really blossomed for the first (but not the last) time, a dozen songs that turned small-town heartbreak into loud and weirdly triumphant anthems. A big part of that is the sound of Foolish, and how that sound perfectly complements the more adventurous songs. But then, despite their rep as a smoking live act who do their best to simply translate that vibe in the studio, Superchunk have always had a real knack for picking the right producer for a specific set of songs, almost from the start. Steve Albini's typically unembellished recording on 1991's No Pocky For Kitty accentuated the wiriness of its very frantic tunes. John Reis added an almost claustrophobic, garage-rock intensity to the rawer set that would make up 1993's On the Mouth. Those albums weren't exactly static, though they did get a lot of mileage out of punk's joyful bashing. But Foolish is very much a big-canvas album, full of stark, quiet-loud shifts, songs with more breathing room, and grander peaks....full text |
| Altmusic |
| But, by the time they were making the fourth Superchunk LP, Foolish, McCaughan and Ballance had parted ways. The wounds were still fresh, but, rather than taking time off, or apart, they kept working; on Merge in a day-to-day sense, and on Foolish as an album. The situation was nothing less than awkward when the LP introduced a set of wounded songs about a relationship on the rocks. Casting himself as a lovelorned 'fool,' McCaughan uses the band's boisterous, noisy, anthemic college-rock as an unlikely vehicle for some genuine emotional bloodletting. The lead single "Driveway to Driveway" lead this charge, McCaughan —still working his distinctive coiled-up riffing and strangulated yelp— singing: "from stage to stage we flew/a drink in every hand/my hand on your heart had been replaced" and "I don't remember this too well/glad I have the scrapes to prove/prove it was me who fell." Previously, McCaughan had been more from the Cobain/Stipe/Black Francis school of lyricism that dominated the era; more often than not, 'chunk songs were evocative gibberish. It's not as if "Driveway to Driveway" —or anything else on Foolish— really changed that. It was the increasing emotional complexity, and the obvious vulnerability, that added a thrilling wrinkle to Superchunk's energetic alt-rock....full text |
| Avclub |
| The arrival of Superchunk’s fourth album, Foolish, in April 1994 accompanied significant changes for the North Carolina band that, nearly two decades later, have become indie-rock lore. First, Foolish was the band’s first full-length on Merge Records, the indie label run by guitarist-vocalist Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance. Now on its own away from Matador, which released its preceding albums, Superchunk had no label advance to fund the studio sessions. That made for a breakneck pace at Pachyderm Studios with producer Brian Paulson—17 songs in three days. As drummer Jon Wurster writes in the new reissue’s extensive liner notes, he stared glumly at a hat Kurt Cobain had set on fire during Nirvana’s In Utero sessions and thought, “I’ll bet those guys had the luxury of doing more than one take.” But the story from Foolish that gets most of the attention is the breakup of the romantic relationship between Ballance and McCaughan, which informed the writing of the album. To what extent is a matter of debate: In Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big And Stayed Small, guitarist Jim Wilbur dismisses the assertion that Foolish is Ballance and McCaughan’s break-up album. McCaughan backs that up: “Some songs start off about one thing, and by the end of the last verse, you’re in a different country,” he says in Our Noise. Wurster mentions the break-up in the liner notes, but adds he doesn’t know how much it informed the lyrics and that he didn’t “recall any awkwardness while touring.” He must’ve not understood why Ballance asked soundmen on that tour to take McCaughan’s vocals out of her monitor. “Because the words were making me cry,” she says in Our Noise. “I would be on stage, playing these songs, and I would be crying. It was terrible. It was a hard tour.” McCaughan has never printed lyrics in Superchunk’s albums, making it more difficult in 1994 to parse the meanings of the songs. But Foolish is an undeniably more somber album, especially compared to its predecessor, On The Mouth. “I didn’t realize it while we were making it, but there’s a darkness to Foolish that doesn’t shade other Superchunk records,” Wurster writes. Where preceding Superchunk albums opened with ragers (particularly On The Mouth’s phenomenal “Precision Auto”), Foolish starts with the contemplative, heartbreaking “Like A Fool,” which builds slowly on twinkling guitar notes for a full minute and a half before McCaughan’s vocals come in. For an album made at such a harried pace, “Like A Fool” sounds deliberate and wistful, practically begging to soundtrack a sad montage in a movie. It only gets rougher on “The First Part” (“How long must the first part last / before we make our respective messes?”), but at least its quicker tempo, intersecting guitar lines, and cheerful instrumental coda distract from the lyrics’ palpable sadness. ...full text |
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