Speaking of seeing Bob Mould earlier this year, here’s the album he was touring in support of when I saw him. At this point, Bob Mould really has nothing to prove. He’s one of the more respected and visible elder statesmen of indie rock, and from what I could tell from the WTF interview he did (also earlier this year), he seems like an all-around solid dude. And I reckon that’s roughly the type of mindset Bob was in when he went in to the studio to record Beauty & Ruin with road-tested vets like Jason Narducy (of Split Single) and Jon Wurster (of being one of my favorite humans ever). Much like 2012’s Silver Age, this album sees Mould continuing to refine the kind of hard-driving, melodic rock music that he’s always done so well, and doing it just as well as any of the gazillions of bands that he influenced with Husker Du and Sugar. One particular stand-out track is “The War”, which sees him looking back on what I can only assume are the hard fought Punk Rock Wars of the ’80s, while displaying why Bob’s one of the select few still triumphantly fighting the fight.