If time heals all wounds, as anybody who has ever suffered heartbreak has been reassured, that’s scant comfort when time won’t move.
On Male Bonding’s 2010 debut Nothing Hurts, a high watermark of the era’s fuzz-punk boom, the London trio stared at the clock, wondering when, exactly, the healing was supposed to begin. “Year’s not long,” singer/ guitarist John Arthur Webb repeated to himself on the band’s breakthrough song, unconvincingly — because in the wake of trauma, a year is an eternity. On the band’s fuming third album Headache, Webb stops straining to find a bright side and just leans into the misery. Opener “Wrench” begins by laying out the kind of worst-case scenario that even the most dejected scorned lovers try to resist considering: What if 15…
…years pass and you still don’t feel any fucking better about things?
It’s been five years since Male Bonding’s last album, Endless Nothing, though it just as well could have been 15, given how off the radar they’ve been lately. At some point after that record, they split from Sub Pop, the label that aided their swift rise, and ceased touring. Their social media accounts sat dark for more than a year before they surprise-released Headache, and at this point even its existence does little to clarify whether they have or haven’t broken up. Releasing a new album for free, with no promotion or any live shows to support it, is the type of thing a band does when they’re over. The no-frills Facebook post announcing the record reads like a farewell note: “Have our third album for free—see ya.”
Was another Male Bonding record necessary after all these years? The band’s debut so effectively laid out their formula—fizzy hooks, neurotic tempos, 1990 production values—that there wasn’t much room to improve on it. Endless Nothing faced the same burden justifying itself, too, and good as it was, that album didn’t add much to their legacy, either. But then again, in the post-No Age age, where this kind of purist noise-rock generates a fraction of the interest it did just a half decade ago, Male Bonding have fallen so far from the public consciousness that they barely have a legacy to protect. There was nothing to lose by giving it another stab.
Perhaps the best thing about Headache, then, is the reminder that this band even existed in the first place, but the album stands on its own merits, too. Since the band once touted the youthful fallacy that nothing ever changes, there’s a curious poignance in hearing how they’ve aged—and, to be sure, they have aged. They’ve grown angrier, crankier and, fittingly, grungier. The boyish harmonies of Nothing Hurts are mostly gone; the band can still turn a hook, but they aren’t nearly as sweet or nimble as the old ones. There used to be something vaguely anti-gravitational about the band’s songs, a lightness, but these tunes hang low to the ground, collecting dirt.
What hasn’t changed is the emotional charge. If anything, Webb’s conviction comes across more pointedly than ever. “Why does this keep happening? I cannot feel the way I want to feel,” he shudders over helter-skelter guitars on “What’s Wrong?” On “Chipping Away,” a sloppy, half-finished sketch of a song, he curses his writer’s block, blaming it on his inability to move on from an estranged ex, but he saves his harshest accusation for the Dinosaur Jr.-heavy “I Would Say”: “Why did you leave when I needed help?”
So on the surface, Headache is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes. It’s also about growing older and, for all the wear, still feeling like yourself, something that anybody who’s been shocked to discover that they connect as deeply with In Utero in their 30s as they did as a teen can relate to. Sometimes there’s comfort in feeling sad, simply because it can remind us of times when we were younger and felt the same. Judging from these cloudy songs, Webb needs all the comfort he can get. “What deserts me cannot hurt me,” he sings on the closer “Out to Sea,” but once again, he’s deluding himself. It already has.