Anymore Time Between. Bob Mould. 1996. Rykodisc.

 Deciphering your way through the emotive tension of a Bob Mould lyric is to pick your way through the ambiguities and rough certainties of failed relationships. He surveils comportment between unhappy couples as obsessively as Elvis Costello, but lyrically he’s oblique, guardedly, arduously, marshaling his instincts around a resolute and deeply personal ethics. Mould’s reputation as a solo artist and founding member of Hüsker Dü and Sugar looms large over alternative rock. Like Neil Young, he’s a committed moralist whose popular image is radiant with the vicious hum of his generation’s rejection of a values system. Workbook, released in 1989, only two years after Hüsker Dü’s final record together, declared a clean break with the monorhythmic punk style of his former band; almost every track sounds like an unacknowledged rock classic. By 1990, however, it was clear that, with the release of Black Sheets of Rain, he had once more grown impatient, this time with conventional song structure. Anymore Time Between, from his self-titled, third record, is a mixture of both styles. It’s a confrontational breakup song sung from shifting perspectives about dishonesty, emotional fatigue, and the irreparable distance between persons. Despite these grievances, Anymore Time Between isn’t just practiced recalcitrance. It has a tensely whispered introduction that functions as a lover’s assessment of habitual deceit before roaring into a high volume accounting of love’s good will having waned. By the time Mould had worked his way into the rock orthodoxy the canonical-minded media had already conferred the title of Conscience of Rock and Roll on any number of high-minded, deserving artist. Mould assumed the axe of that conscience’s exterminating angel.

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