Bob Mould's sucker punch: Modulate and the art of the bullshit ripoff

I’m not quite sure that I’ve ever heard so many customarily reasonable people so utterly and unequivocally pissed off over something as negligible as a rockroll record. But, man, it seems as though everyone who has bothered to give Bob Mould’s Modulate a listening winds up a seething, hostile bundle of rattled nerves. And why not - the record is, in fact, a disaster; the horrifying consequence of a botched marriage between Mould’s pretentious, misguided ambition and his flat out wrong-minded and altogether goofy musical experimentation. Mould’s dabbling stab at electronica isn’t merely inconsequential, it is patently offensive. This is the sort of misstep that threatens to entirely negate Bob Mould as a viable anything anymore. But, hell, to be honest I could care less about Mould’s perhaps hopeless future; I am far more interested in the staggering and intensely passionate negative response to the record that I keep encountering. "Oh my God," goes one assessment, "that record is such shit that I wanted to throw it out the fucking window of my car by the third song – and I love that guy."

That bad? So bad that it doesn’t just slip under a silent blanket of apathy and just disappear? It is the worst. Modulate is a rotten waste of time and noise that will, if reasonable people are to be heard from in our future, forever contend for "worst record of all-time" crowns wherever those sorts of ridiculous lists turn up – and it just may top them. It is an insult to the good people who have stuck to their guns with Mould throughout his spotty solo career. All of that passion spent by the ones who like the guy and this is their payback? It’s more like a swift kick in the nuts,

Okay, so the record sucks, but why are people so pissed off about it? I mean, aside from the fact that someone as revered as Mould would intentionally release something so calculatingly useless, or that people took good time from their day and hard-earned money from their wallets to purchase a record that only serves to slap them across the face with a big ‘fuck you’ grin…geez, why are people so livid about this thing?

My normally subdued and gentlemanly friend Carl, who was (and I do mean was) a fanatic for all thing Mould almost got himself slapped up on public unruliness and assault charges when he tried to forcibly return the disc to the record retailer from which he bought it. He’d apparently been a bit agitated in his demand that they take the goddamn thing back and put it up on a display that clearly denounced the disc as a sickening fraud.

And then there’s my old friend Dale, as big a Bob Mould fan as you’re likely to ever meet (he often – with a straight face nonetheless – tells me that Mould’s Workbook is an "eternal modern classic"), old Dale ends up breaking down in tears – real fucking tears - over his lunch when I ask if he’d heard Modulate yet. Weird.

I was as disappointed as anyone when Husker Du died, and although I’d initially thought Workbook to be a decent record, it didn’t hold up to time’s test and I’d decided not to trust Mould as much after that. His second solo shot, Black Sheets of Rain, then bored me into an apathy from which return started to seem impossible. So when Grant Hart released Intolerance and seemed in the end to be he more viable solo artist of the two (and maybe the more enduring songwriter from Husker Du’s catalog) I shifted my allegiances (I was leaning Hart’s way all along anyways and never knew it) and buried Mould – for good. I did stumble into ownership of Copper Blue, his better (which means half-decent here) Sugar effort; I’d spent cash on his self-titled Ryko supposed return-to-form (it wasn’t) senselessly; and I was sent a copy of The Last Dog and Pony Show for review – which was painful in both the listening and the writing. None of these records were without their redeeming moments, all of them at least aimed true, and some songs even approached a sense of timelessness, but none of the albums, taken as a whole, were much noticeable. You could be play any one of them and - but for a scant moment -you’d never really hear them. Like the short startle that a basement furnace kicking on brings, you’d hear the music start playing from somewhere but then it would quickly drift into the everyday background noises of life as it really went unheard and you went about your business.

But true believers die hard, and some never die at all. The most irate Modulate listeners that I know are those who still believe – and probably always will – in the Bob Mould of onceuponatime. I do not begrudge them their passion. I do, however, warn them of its folly, because I too have worn their tired shoes. Modulate is not a simple misadventure, it’s a catastrophe of insulting proportions; one that dims whatever light that may have remained at the end of Bob Mould’s tunnel. And if you’re remotely familiar with Mould’s illustrious past and this doesn’t make you mad, it sure as hell is gonna make you sick when you hear it. So try not to.

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