by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Ganser’s latest studio offering is both a welcome glimpse into the band’s continued creative vitality after canceled tours threatened to stall their momentum as well as a respectful culmination of the band’s work with Nadia Garafalo. On Nothing You Do Matters, they split the difference between the immediate and an emotional distance to create some of their best tracks yet, ending up with a dancey, atmospheric take on post-punk resembling Priests or Wax Idols at their most stylized. Composed primarily by Ganser’s rhythm section, Alicia Gaines (bass) and Brian Cundiff (drums), the EP’s offerings diverge stylistically from the more caustic material on their last LP, Just Look at That Sky, but in ways that widen their sonic palette rather than sand off the things that make them interesting, like the sardonic point of view they’ve cultivated to great effect so far.
The music of “People Watching” is credited solely to Brian Cundiff, Ganser’s drummer, and the compositional choices reflect a rhythmic restraint. The song opens with a lone bass line by Gaines before launching into the main riff, hooky, compact and largely eschewing the noisier, more abstract approach favored on some of Ganser’s spikier cuts for something more direct and muscular. They offer less of the expressive midrange that Charlie Landsman favored on the LP, but the additional heft is satisfying in the framework of the song, with the riff landing hard on the backbeat so there’s no ambiguity about when to move. The lyrical content here isn’t as withering as it may come off on paper — one of Garafalo’s many fingerprints in the band has been tempering her biting observations with a bit of irony, a relishing in one's flaws when viewed through the lens of how much worse she could be. There’s a provocation in this, an invitation to dismiss their point of view as that of a dysfunctional outsider, but there’s also a resignation present that comes off as nonchalant at first (“No one is giving / It’s so disappointing,”) until the end where it’s boiled over into exhaustion (“Talk until your words lose meaning”).
“What Me Worry?” is written and sung by Alicia Gaines, a dramatic guitar figure weaving in and out of her slinky basswork while she vocalizes about an interaction with a stranger gone wrong — the smarmy way they might feel entitled to your attention, all the while delivering backhanded compliments. Her delivery feels perfect for the point of view embodied, at some points more of a shudder than true words, the dread palpable in the way she scrapes the bottom of her voice while mocking this character’s opening: “Long time listener, first time caller/I love your show / Say what you mean / What do you need?” The shuffling drums bring to mind the electronica of Is This Desire? era PJ Harvey, while the movement of the synth lines aren’t far from the deliberate drama of The Cure. The guitar is more characteristically Ganser on this track, but tinged with the overall danceability of the project; by trading ugly bends for well timed slides on the guitar, the effect ends up feeling like it has a bigger impact on the song more than just radically changing his playing style might.
The remix, done by Angus Andrew of the band Liars, is relatively faithful to the main elements of the track. It places the focus on Garafalo’s manipulated vocals and the original drum track while opting to retain the same structure and shorten the bridge section, using it to introduce Gaines’ vocals as the response to Garafalo’s hook when the main section returns. It fits in well with the evil cheerleader vibe introduced earlier in the track with Garafalo’s voice echoing infinitely against herself and further refines the track into a sugar rush in order to maintain its momentum.
Where the material on Ganser’s last LP, Just Look at That Sky, was restless and unsettled, the songs on Nothing You Do Matters are meditative in comparison. The guitars, typically gnarled and expressive but far from traditional guitar playing, are smoothed out here, settling on repetitious hooks to get their message across. While this is Ganser’s poppiest material to date, it’s only relative to what came before. The structures are simple, but there’s a magic trick to the way they’re represented — the driving repetition making each section chorus-like in effect, while at the same time the rarely changing riffs imbue each passing moment with a rising tension rather than a cathartic release, a fitting end for their final outing with their original line up.