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Title: Just Getting Better
Review: Now off the underground's official radar screen, professional indie band Superchunk keep getting better. Here's to Shutting Up, their eighth studio release, continues in the vein of the wonderful Come Pick Me Up. They rock less (middle age can do that to you) but think more, and the trade-off is equitable. They're picking up new sounds - steel guitar on the country-ish "Phone Sex", electronica on "What Do You Look Forward To?", string quartet (!) on "Late-Century Dream" - while never sounding like genre-chasers. A lot of forgiving and forgetting is going on in these songs, signs of maturity and/or defeat. On "Florida's on Fire", which might possibly be about a certain election, the chorus of "yeah, yeah's" that follow each line are both funny and haunting, absurd laughter in the face of overwhelming disappointment. Excellent.
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