The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar

(Atlantic 2011)

Review by Null

The Joy Formidable are a three-piece that hail from Wales. They are some sort of mystic force that permeates the senses with beauty, mystery, and mountains of swirling majestic guitars. This shit was hatched from the Mabinogion, old Welch medieval folktales. There is magic at hand here, and while listening, I sometimes believe in fairies, fairies that listen to Iron Maiden and make love in fields of day-glow green after a good Welch rain shower in spring. It took a few listens to understand the grandiose and sensual beauty of this band. However, after spending some time with them, I simply raise my favorite Welch Ale toward the sky and scream, “Bloody Brilliant!”

Ritzy sings; her voice has an almost bird-like melancholic beauty that is able to pierce the swirling wall of melodic noise, which gives her the power of flight. She also plays guitar with a massive effects board. Rhydian, the bass player, sings sometimes but he mostly lays down the bottom end with classic and catchy, tight bass lines. Matt, the drummer, is the heartbeat of the band who understands both the subtlety of sleep and palpitations that pump blood through this cyclopsian beast of a band. Matt and Rhydian lay down a solid and intense foundation to rock this house of voodoo. Almost every song starts with some oddly familiar guitar-bass-drum combo that promises super melodic guitar pop and, in this respect, the band does indeed deliver. However, this is only the lighting of the fuse, a fuse that is attached to a rocket that ends up swirling into the stratosphere. Stunning. The music The Joy Formidable make is both uplifting and menacing, full of love and anger. I wish I was in this band.

This is how it is:

The album starts off by challenging the listener. It simply opens with the sounds of things being thrown around or knocked about. It is a not-so-subtle warning that artists are at work here. They are about to engage. Then, the first track, “The Everchanging Spectrum of A Lie,” begins to pulse and swell until, almost eight minutes later, it ends in a wall of static and noise that bleeds into distorted laugher that kicks of “The Magnifying Glass,” which is a hard hitting up-tempo rocker. The next song, “I Don’t Want To See You Like This,” begins with Matt’s tight rolling drums fading in. Through the wall of psychedelic, melody driven beauty, Ritzy’s voice exudes both spitting anger and concern but it never loses its sweet melancholia.

At this point I was wondering where these guys were going with this sound. This music seems to exist somewhere between elegant catchy pop songwriting craftsmanship and angelic electric youthful noise. I go crazy for bands that have a strong personality and I am a sucker for melding extreme juxtapositions. Is this music guitar pop, art noise, shoe-gazing, or some sort of Les Thugs hybrid of heavy rock? How does it simultaneously make me feel ecstatic sadness, satisfied yearning, and hope? It makes me feel like it is spring and I am running down the road naked as a child after discovering I am in love with Laura Engels. Am I having an orgasm or silently longing over faded photographs?

As the record proceeds, I was soon to realize that all this is true. No matter what this music makes you feel, every question is answered affirmatively with “yes!”

As the third song ends, I realized The Joy Formidable where just getting started. In the first three songs they are simply mixing the batter, kneading the dough. The ingredients for the wedding cake that would signify the union of Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock, of the macro and the micro, the ecstatic and the forlorn was only beginning to take shape.

Then these motherfuckers started to bake.

The following three tracks, “Austere,” “A Heavy Abacus,” and “Whirring” solidified what I had been guessing. This is the best new band I have heard in a long fucking time.

From “A Heavy Abacus”:

Happiness, it won’t last long

And this child behind stores it all

The failed man’s curse and the cost

Of nonchalance…

Now your world is here

Watch it disappear…

Abacus haunting me…

All we have is this chance called memory

Read it again. These are some profound lyrics and the pulsing music quickens the heart as the angelic voice whispers and warns, “Live now, live now. Your only life is fleeting.”

I am 39 years old running naked down the street mourning the unrequited love of Laura Engels.

Then “Whirring” starts, like the others, with a quick elegant hook, Ritzy seems to sing my experience of this music,

This much delight fills columns to new heights

All these things about me, you never can tell

Colors run prime, paint a picture so bright

All these things about me you never can tell

You make me sleep so badly invisible friend

Jesus Christ. This band is singing my life to me. It is at this moment that they became the only band that matters as my life ticks away and I swim in a language unable to accurately convey my love to this painful, beautiful world. The autumn leaves fly like angles, dead outside my window. It is no accident that both magnifying glasses and telescopes are present in the lyrics. This is why I love music.

Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that “Whirring” was going to continue for the next seven minutes splashing paint that signified the fleeting moments in time and space. Just as the song seems to be reaching its climax, it simply moves to another level of intensity, each wave breaking to reveal behind it a greater wave. Somewhere in the onslaught of pounding instruments lay a hidden quite reflection. Moments later, at the exhausted apex, Matt kicks in with his Iron Maiden double-bass drums and supernovas explode in my heart. This, my friend, is fucking music. Best song of the year 2011. Hands down.

At this point the album is only half over. The last half of the album continues to titillate with up-tempo punk chord progressions and mellow dreamscapes filled with Welch fog and Hitchcockian tricks of the eye. Until, the last track, “The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade,” a pulsating beauty of a song, seems to simultaneously exude longing and rebirth, Ritzy promises, “a calm day will come.” Whether this “calm” comes from wisdom or death, I believe she is correct. This band could be the soundtrack to Pangaea breaking up, or falling in love. In truth, it is both.

The Big Roar is The Joy Formidable’s first “proper” album but there are many singles and earlier tracks that one can find on iTunes or whatever, most notably, “Greyhounds In the Slip” is not to be missed. They also do a cover of Roy Orbison! Go get them all to supplement this fucking amazing record. If they had a cult, I would join it. I have been waiting a long time to hear a new band this good that gives an old romantic / materialist like me the soundtrack for understanding that epic tales do not live in some mystic realm but in the magnificence of our own daily lives. The Joy Formidable are not magic rocking fairies in the time of King Arthur but three human beings. That makes me love them even more. A great new band. Wonderful. Turn Up The Love.