The Joy Formidable: Wolf's Law (Review)

The Joy Formidable: Wolf’s Law (Canvasback/Atlantic, 2013)

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a whole lot of revivalism goin’ on.  Simon Reynolds doesn’t like it, and claims that everything old is unoriginal again (in Retromania) and while I like some of his work, I’m not buying the worries about retromania.  Music critics tend to work in one of two main directions: either reviewing a record and throwing out musical signposts and legacies that said record recalls (the RIYL [recommended if you like] review), or evaluating a record and lamenting how there’s nothing new under the sun present in the grooves (the Old Hat review).  And I get it.  If you listen to records for a living, I imagine you will eventually become bored and wish for something that will cause you to reconceive your whole musical world.  RIYL reviews have their place, but they can also frustrate: if I had a nickel for every band I checked out because they allegedly ‘sound like XTC and Squeeze’ only to left wanting, I’d be able to fund an actual XTC reunion show.  (Not really).  So, as we sit, in the early parts of the second decade of the ‘oughts, we find that two of the biggest current revivals tie themselves to musical scenes/genres from (roughly) twenty years ago: the 90’s Alternative Revival and the Nu-Gaze Revival.  

The beginnings of the Nu Gaze revival might have been found in the short-lived blog hysteria over chillwave and glo-fi.  While most of the seminal shoegaze bands had broken up or simply vanished, the willingness to use shoegazery sound-washes started to make those bands hip to namecheck for the first time in a long while.  While chillwave quickly grew passé for bloggers, and commercial radio paid no heed to Toro Y Moi or Memory Tapes, more than a few young bands began to incorporate elements of many of the 90’s biggest alternative bands into their sounds, and, of course, many of those 90’s bands had, themselves, liberally borrowed from shoegaze.  By the end of the 2000’s, bands like Yuck, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Silversun Pickups, Metric, and many others were echoing bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, and many more from the alt-rock goldrush.

The Joy Formidable fit into both categories: there’s a clear line of influence from the criminally underappreciated female-fronted shoegaze combo Lush, if only because of the combination of aggressively buzzy guitars and occasionally delicate vocals from frontwoman Ritzy Bryan.  Interestingly, though, the songs that do echo Lush sound less like their early, Cocteau Twins-indebted ethereal incarnation (the first three EPs, compiled as Gala or the first full-length, Spooky) and more like the charged up, Britpoppy latter day record Lovelife.  But there’s also the guitar skronk and emotional gravitas of a jacked up Billy Corgan, and the noisy guitar heroics of a J Mascis or Thurston Moore, not to mention heavier shoegazers like Swervedriver (circa Mezcal Head) and Catherine Wheel.  And Bryan’s vocals (big and powerful, coming from a tiny Welsh pixie) certainly owe something to Shirley Manson, as well as fellow Welsh belter Cerys Matthews (of Catatonia). “Maw Maw Song” features shifting tempos and metallic riffs that echo Black Sabbath.  There’s a ‘wild’ vibe to many of the lyrics, which are replete with mentions of animals, forests, and weather (Wolf’s Law, by the way, is a medical theory about the adaptable strength of bone under pressure).  The recording of the album, by the band (and mixed by master-mixer Andy Wallace), took place in a snowed-in cabin in a remote part of Maine, and this could be the source of the Thoreau-esque naturalism that runs through the lyrics (“through the mists and sun and gales and showers/no season to where my love begins”) and album art (surrealist paintings of animals by Martin Wittfooth).

A whole lot of people were exposed to the Joy Fomidable as a result of their inclusion in one of the Twilight soundtracks.  Those people might be somewhat off put by some of the more aggressive songs on Wolf’s Law, but there’s plenty to appeal to suburban housewives, teen vampire romance fans, and those, like me, who miss the heyday of bands like Lush, Swervedriver, and The Catherine Wheel.  It’s also a record that rewards repeat listens: there are plentiful hooks but there are also lots of little moments that sneak past you, at first, but bubble up once the power of the hooks and melodies recede into the background.