SUPERCHUNK - INDOOR LIVING (ORIGINAL US PRESSING)

Indoor Living is about domestication: The taming and training of human beings to inhabit each others’ lives, during which a certain amount of blood is spilled. But anyone can write a break-up record, anyone can color in a broken heart all black. It takes a more sophisticated eye to find the light and perfect moments that happen even when we wish they didn’t, and Indoor Living is a scrapbook of those moments. A request for mercy comes across like an in-joke (“We both know that I’ve got bad knees”) in “Watery Hands.” “European Medicine” is a lively travelog that’s by turns amusingly fatalistic (“All our wine just froze, so much for your sunny coast”) and achingly needy (“Hold my hand steady while I write / Look over my shoulder all night”). Even “The Popular Music,” the record’s angriest slice of heartache, has a protagonist that can’t quite pull off a fully punk rock tantrum: “I’m smashing not washing the china you left me to use,” but “making mosaics of scenes from the parts of my life that you left me to lose.”

Angst is easy, hope is hard. Thinking you’re going to die from a broken heart is easy, knowing you won’t is hard. Adulthood is about forsaking the black and white resolutions of youth for a more complicated, and resonant, resilience: From “Burn Last Sunday,” one of the saddest lines in indie rock: “The branches you thought you’d break / Well, they just bend.” In music and with people, maturity happens when the sharp edges and jangly rhythms of angst and outrage give over to fuller conversations. Indoor Living shows that you don’t have to lose a single joule of energy in becoming a little more self-reflective. You just have to be willing to take it all in.