Nothing – Tired of Tomorrow

While sitting in the world’s most absurd café after completing the world’s most meandering walk, your phone suggests you listen to Nothing’s Famine Asylum off of their 2020 album, The Great Dismal. You’re reminded of an earlier album by the same band, 2016’s Tired of Tomorrow, as a beskirted post-Soviet NFT scamster asks a vaguely Mediterranean dad-bodied man wearing a deep blue TOMMY JEANS tee to take a photo of the fifteen con artists gathered behind you. You’re listening to one of the best shoegaze albums of the 2010s (Tired of Tomorrow) by one of Philadelphia’s best shoegaze exports (Nothing) as it reaches the first of many crescendos – on its best track (Track 3, Vertigo Flowers) – in the world’s weirdest café.

This is the sort of album that smacks you back to reality as you spend an afternoon sipping on cold brew out of a negroni glass under immense silver-plated chandeliers. The sort of album that reminds you – this is really happening. The bronze man in the white merino sweater vest is as real as the crunch of the guitar tone on Curse of the Sun. The browning of the indoor rubber plant’s leaves is as real as the bass guitar bathing the album in a sort of Slowdivian shimmer, a counterpoint to the muscular guitar riffs that act as its spine. The token-based coffee subscription plan, the Bored Ape token on one wall, the pixelated American Gothic on another, the dessert the otherwise reasonable-seeming couple two tables away has ordered that’s just two massive meringues that wouldn’t be out of place atop a stone column – all as real as the reverb-drenched vocals on Our Plague, the album’s penultimate track.

This is really happening. The music really has stopped. Outside the café, the scamsters really are making plans with their spouses and kids. At the end of the table at which they were seated until recently, two old friends really are laughing. The couple two tables away really is staring into empty plates. This could be anywhere.