Foolish (CD - 1993)

Audio Mixers: Superchunk; Brian Paulson.

Recording information: Pachyderm.

Unknown Contributor Roles: Jon ?; Laura Ballance.

Forged at a difficult time in the band's history, this album is a dark masterpiece that contrasts the band's signature high-energy power punk attack of On the Mouth with a far more somber, orchestrated approach, while still retaining the band's melancholy melodic majesty. From the opening track, "Like a Fool," with it's droning guitar and languid pace, Superchunk serves notice of their desire to move in new directions. The band itself was in flux, deciding to release Foolish on its own label, Merge, abandoning Matador, who'd help shepherd the successful On the Mouth album. There were also band tensions arising from the breakup of Mac and bassist Laura Ballance, hinted at in Ballance's morbid album art of a disgruntled woman with a butchered rabbit hanging behind her. There's also Mac's bitter words. He goes lyrically from the Icarus-fantasy "Water Wings," where a female "pointed to the black cloud in the sky/and said that's what happened when you try to fly," to "Without Blinking," where he laments, "when you said you're sorry, you did it without blinking/and you can not know how much that hurts." But great works are often forged out of misfortune. Wedding their melodic impulses with a more sedate approach that utilizes increasingly complexity, Superchunk create a emotionally taut album that maps the changing direction of the band as it moves away from its crunchy, arena-pop roots. ~ Chris Parker

After two classic albums, Superchunk found itself "divorced" from the semi-major record label Matador and back on Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance's label, Merge. With this retrenchment also came an end to the long-time romantic relationship of McCaughan and Ballance. Astoundingly, not only did Superchunk the band survive the dissolution of its founders' relationship, but managed to produce a brilliant album in response. Not since the divorce of John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, (which resulted in the painfully transcendent AIN'T LOVE GRAND), or the separation of Richard and Linda Thompson has this much pain been transformed into musical catharsis.

Superchunk's obscure, sometimes hidden lyrics have always prompted speculation into their meaning and FOOLISH seems loaded with allusions to the couple's romantic demise. When McCaughan sings "And you trusted me/like a fool" (in the achingly beautiful "Like a Fool"), it is hard to associate the singer with anyone other than his ex-muse. It was perhaps no coincidence that FOOLISH is stylistically leaps and bounds above any of the bands previous work in both conception and form. "Driveway to Driveway" is the uber-Superchunk song, and combines the band's prettiest melody with restrained bursts of guitar and McCaughan's most emotional singing to date. minimize