Superchunk

REISSUED!!! With a lot of SUPERCHUNK products, it’s easy to think there’s a simple message because the music is so direct. But on Indoor Living, typically unfussy guitar hooks and shout-sung tag lines that beg for an audience to croon along are just the overarching structure of a record that moons over details: “Marquee” drapes a lazy sonic arm over the seat, pulling you in for a story about egos twisting apart. “Martinis on the Roof ” puts a slightly manic, rueful smile on the loss of a friend, a search for that emotion that lurks in a mix of anger and nostalgia. Indoor Living is about domestication: The taming and training of human beings to inhabit each others’ lives, during which a certain amount of blood is spilled. But anyone can write a break-up record, anyone can color in a broken heart all black. It takes a more sophisticated eye to find the light and perfect moments that happen even when we wish they didn’t, and Indoor Living is a scrapbook of those moments. A request for mercy comes across like an in-joke in “Watery Hands.” “European Medicine” is a lively travelog that’s by turns amusingly fatalistic and achingly needy. Even “The Popular Music,” the record’s angriest slice of heartache, has a protagonist that can’t quite pull off a fully punk rock tantrum. Angst is easy, hope is hard. Thinking you’re going to die from a broken heart is easy, knowing you won’t is hard. Adulthood is about forsaking the black and white resolutions of youth for a more complicated, and resonant, resilience. In music and with people, maturity happens when the sharp edges and jangly rhythms of angst and outrage give over to fuller conversations. Indoor Living shows that you don’t have to lose a single joule of energy in becoming a little more self-reflective. You just have to be willing to take it all in. Trying to hear Indoor Living the way I heard it sixteen years ago was easier than I wanted it to be. Though of course—of course!—I’ve listened to the record on and off in the intervening time, I had forgotten how familiar this record is to me. I had forgotten I knew all the words to every song, could anticipate every hesitant drop in rhythm and wavering chorus. This record was the soundtrack of being 25 and because of that, it does remind me of a really specific time; but that time is not so much the late ’90s as the turning point between adolescence and adulthood, which happens later and later to me every year.—Ana Marie Cox, 2013