Britain's answer to Silversun Pickups, Wolf Alice release "She" from forthcoming debut EP, "Blush". Recalling the greatest moments of 1990s alternative radio, "She" rips along on fuzzy and chunky guitars, an empty breakdown that portends a screaming, crashing conclusion. Soaring above it all is vocalist Ellie Rowsell, a powerful slice of fecundity in the maw of electrical guitars, like a garage version of Ritzy from Joy Formidable. Rowsell represents the soul and power of the massive wall of "She", making this alleged woman at once dangerous and ineffable.
All unfiltered bombast on "Dream Machines", Big Deal drape themselves in a blighted, shouting fatalism. "Dream Machines", slamming with double-tap drums and a boy-girl duet sounds like Joy Formidable (and it's worth noting that Big Deal are the heirs to this throne) covering a Stars joint, dream-pop holding a long kiss goodnight with shoegaze. One of the biggest songs of the year, it's a world of moral victories and letdowns, as singer Alice Costelloe leads from above with lines like, "Nothing here is built to last / what you wanted and what you chose / you can't have both." Instead of a shrugging conclusion, there lies triumph in the big, crunchy chord progression and Costelloe's duet with partner Kacey Underwood. Finding both union and beauty in the noise, singing to one another, "What's mine is yours is yours is mine," before concluding, "We'll grow our hair / cut our ties." As the arrangement surges around them, we presume these two are planning to leave everything but each other.
Ritzy Bryan is absolutely possessed. It is a mixture of sex and violence, rock and roll tied up in this white Victorian dress. Her signature stare, a blend of surprise and being overcome, scanned the corners of the room at Littlefield, a challenge and a dare from the lead singer of the Joy Formidable, one of the best rock bands you can currently see live. But this possession, the seeming loss of control in the hands of the moment has a secondary quality. As Bryan collapsed, heaved and writhed in the hands of her music, she captured the audience, a trick of being possessed and possessing in the same moment. Her eyes, writ large for effect, communicated that she was both here and somewhere else, or, that what was happening was about both her and her audience.
Playing a few intimate shows in New York in advance of their coming sophomore LP, Wolf's Law, the band took the stage at a sold-out and still entirely pleasant Littlefield, to the head-nodding tones of "The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade". Bryan produced her perfect little diorama of destruction on the song's signature lyric, "This dream is in a telescope now," a line written four years ago that seems almost anachronistic now that the band is seemingly so close to crossover, mainstream success. Put another way, the last time they played Brooklyn was nearly three years ago at Union Hall, and though Littlefield is just a few short blocks away, these two sets are separated by a gulf of touring, record sales and reputation-building as a one of the single most transformative live bands of their generation. Using this past to craft their future, the band played, "I Don't Want To See You Like This," a favorite from their debut LP before unleashing, "This Ladder Is Ours," the consensus first single from their forth-coming record. There is little better metaphor than possession of a ladder upwards, especially given the song's video featuring the band in a house blown to bits. Joy Formidable aim upwards because they are so gifted at the creative destruction of their surroundings.
The band moved through favorites, "Cradle," the first song that seized the American audience, and "Heavy Abacus" before playing some new, as-yet-unknown material. They returned to their back catalog on closer, "Whirring", a song where Bryan is at her finest zombie self, charging around the stage, bangs swaying at her eye line with a mixture of menace and couture. In the final moments of "Whirring", bassist Rhydian Dafydd pounded the cymbals on the drum kit, pointing to drummer Matt Thomas and mouthing, "This fucking guy" as Thomas did what he does best: unleashing double-tap fill after double-tap fill. Thomas returned the favor, giving Dafydd the finger which took one hand away from his drumming, a fact that did not seem to disrupt the fury coming from the kit.
Closing with a bit of the dualism that made them suitably famous, Joy Formidable returned for an encore of the acoustic, "Silent Treatment" and the thrashing "Ever Changing Spectrum Of A Lie". Bryan did both poles well, vulnerable and a bit awkward without her guitar and then wantonly destructive. It was possessed and possession, weakness and strength, quiet and loud, a band that is always moving in two directions at once. Finally, this dualism will be appropriately reconciled as they move onward and upward on a ladder of their own making, sex and violence in the same breath.
A ripping little arrangement, Olympic Swimmers' single "Knots" rolls along on a firm bass line and the fractious vocals of lead singer Susie Smillie. At times "Knots" speaks in the language of dream-pop, winsome guitars locked in an ethereal struggle for existence, while at others Smillie's voice breaks upwards into a crystalline falsetto and recalls, bizarrely, a less thrashing Ritzy Bryan of Joy Formidable. Scottish pop sensibilities - Olympic Swimmers, another in a long line of great Glasgow bands - color the edges, everything a bit shrouded in a reverb and touches of fuzz, but with enough clarity to describe the architecture of moral victories in grey cities so twisted and tangled, you might reasonably never find your way out.
The Joy Formidable's Ritzy Bryan has the biggest eyes in rock music. She opens her lids wide in a mixture of menace, dare, excitement and, of course, joy. All these emotions and impulses made, as stares at her audience, simply by arching and hiding her eyebrows beneath her jagged, bleach blond bangs. This says nothing of her and her bandmates' mercurial qualities, an explosive mixture of spinning and thrash. It is a little thing, Ritzy Bryan's high eyebrows and her piercing blue eyes, but for a band so open on stage, so engaging with their fans and so giving of their energy, the evening in Providence was about letting their audience in, and without doing the whole pedantic, windows-to-the-soul thing, we see her, and more importantly, she sees us.
The Joy Formidable, a band we've seen in a range of venues from Brooklyn basements to opening for Passion Pit at Terminal 5, opened their set at the Met in Providence with "Greyhounds In The Slips", a song about getting out of town, before ramming the latest album stunner, "Magnifying Glass" into the first five rows of the audience. It is a Monday night in a second-rate northeastern city, and there are maybe 50 people crowding the front - it is not New York by a mile - but Ritzy and Rhydian run into each other and motor around the stage like this is the most important show of their year. This is their charm and their gift. In this moment, as they move to play "Austere", they are the best band in the world.
They play "The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade" and the massive "Cradle" before answering a request from the front row. A girl, maybe of high school age, had asked for the quieter "9669" and Ritzy looks directly at her, big eyes again, and says, "This is for you." It is a simple and winning moment. The band closes their set with "Bouy" and a prolonged and feedback-heavy version of "Whirring," the latter of which ends with Rhydian throwing his bass and Ritzy ripping the strings off her guitar. It is a weekday night in Providence and the band will have to restring their instruments tomorrow before the tour goes on and they do all this again; build, destroy, build again. The lyrics of "Greatest Light" nearly still ringing in the rafters, "This dream is in a telescope now." Eyes open, with magnification, audience and band look right at each other, closer than ever.
Joy Formidable have been one of our favorite new bands ever since NME gave away their debut EP in early '09. Over the last two years, we've caught them opening for Passion Pit at T5 and crushing the basement of Union Hall. They are one of the most explosive rock bands touring, and this is no more evident than on "Whirring," a song that took over and erupted at a sold out Bowery Ballroom last night.
The Joy Formidable made their first trip across the ocean from Wales to the United States with a string of sold out shows in New York. We exchanged some emails with lead-singer, Ritzy Bryan. She reflects on the band's early distribution choices, decibels, and if New Yorkers are, in fact, jerks.
32feet: How did the decision to release the record through NME for free come about?
Ritzy Bryan: NME were the first to stream it for free, but it had been available from us prior to that as a free download. We wanted people to hear the record and we were confident that it would generate some real fans, who go on to see you live, and invest in different ways. We put a lot of thought into the physical format; a boxset, a poster edition: that balance between download and having something to hold and collect is important us. Was it a success; yeah it was a great record , everything else is pretty irrelevant.
The scope of your record, A Balloon Called Moaning is massive. It is true "big room" music. What were the inspirations for the sound?
We didn't go into it thinking I want it to sound like this, this or this, but we know what sonically pushes our buttons, what gives us goosebumps. I'm really tuned into dynamics, when things take off , I want to feel the walls quivering. You can have a great song, but on record if it misses that mark, it's really disappointing. In some places ABCM is pushed within an inch of its dBs, a producers nightmare, but we stuck with it, that's how it came out.
Do you have a favorite song on the album?
It changes everytime I hear it. The best thing is that I don't have a least favourite. Today it's "9669."
You all just came through New York for the first time, opening for Passion Pit and then doing two of your own gigs at Union Hall and Pianos. New Yorkers are crushing narcissists. Tell us what you thought of us.
If they are, they hid it well. We had a brilliant time, a very warm welcome, loved seeing the PP boys again and two sold out shows of our own. We're itching to go back and hopefully this time do a longer tour.
Who is your favorite band you've shared a stage with so far? And do you have a dream tour partner?
We haven't toured with any arseholes, all the bands we've travelled with have been great, and many have become friends. And that's not the safe answer, there's plenty of arseholes out there like in every job, we've just been lucky or forged our own luck not to play with them. I've got a real soft spot for Passion Pit and Temper Trap as people, and musical admiration as well. A dream tour partner, let me think, my knees would shake if we opened for Elvis Costello.
Any big news for 2010 you can let the world in on?
The focus at the moment is our debut album, it's almost finished and we'll be releasing it later in the year. We've loved making it, after months on the road writing it, and it being an abstraction it's finally coming together. The headline tour in March will be our biggest to date and we'll be previewing some of the album, so that's exciting, and then in May we'll be Stateside again, doing a tour of Alaska.
In a sleepy section of Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood, The Joy Formidable are flooding a basement with a wall of noise. The room is packed, a guest-list stuffed, much buzzed show; only their fourth in the US. From the opening chords of album and set opener, "The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade," it is easy to see why. Vocalist Ritzy Bryan is a sprite of energy, equal parts Emily Haines, Courtney Love and Karen O. With bangs cut at an aggressive straight-line and a shock of blond hair, Byran stares blankly, almost possessed through the opening tones of "Cradle," the night's second song, before exploding into the verse.
Undeniably, the night's best moments come near the beginning and at the very end. The set loses its mandate in the middle, though Bryan and bassist RhydianDafydd never lose their edge. Deeper cuts from the band's seminal debut, A Balloon Called Moaning, fill the middle of the set. Even at their most middling, there is something about this music, parts shoegaze, parts garage-rock that moves the crowd to bounce, clap and cheer along. The band, of course, saves its best for last.
Motoring through "Austere," we are left the the crashing and intensely melodic "Whirring." A yuppie to my 12 o'clock whispers in his girlfriend's ear, "This is their big radio single." She nods knowingly. She has no idea. The Joy Formidable, twenty rows toward the front thank us before stomping into the opening chords. The song will end with a thrashing breakdown, leaving the crowd wrecked and Bryan's guitar beyond repair. As the band returns for an encore, Bryan fiddling around with her equipment for a minute before sheepishly apologizing because her guitar simply won't play. This is much more than a basement band, willing to break themselves to achieve something larger, and next time you see them it will not be in a room this small.
Neko Case is to animal metaphors what Siegfried and Roy are to dangerous jungle cats. She manages to compare love to a taming of a wild, completely undomesticated animal. "You know, they call them killer whales," Case elaborates, "but you seem surprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around?" The supposition is that if you jump in tank with a deadly animal, you might want to table your shock when it is ripping your face off. Case declares herself a "man-eater" in the chorus and we are hardly prepared to judge. After all, we put her songs in our music library, we let her in, and maybe we should just be happy to still be alive.
In one of my favorite running jokes of 2009, a friend of mine would send me texts every month, simply reading: "Guess what?" Of course, it was a paraphrase of Marina's signature lyric from "I Am Not A Robot." She was baiting me and to lose this game, I needed to send back a genuine, "What?" But for me to win, I would need to reply, "I'm not a robot," correctly completing the phrase. Over time, the question never changed but the answers evolved. Guess what? "I AM a robot." Guess what? "We are all robots." Guess what? This song is a crushing examination of our humanity and how quickly we can become romantic technocrats. Guess what? We aren't robots, no matter how hard we try.
18. Everything Everything - "MY KZ, UR BF"
In an email I sent to one of my A&R friends at Sony, I described Everything Everything as Passion Pit, but from the other side of the pond. Their first single, "Photoshop Handsome" indicated promise, but follow-up "MY KZ, UR BF" (or "My Keys, Your Boyfriend") proved that this band is going to make its money by packing enough hooks that you can't reasonably breathe. With vocals that bounce like an attention-deficit rubber ball and a chorus with elements of a head-nodding epic, "MY KZ, UR BF" is nearly radio-ready. 2010 is going to be a big year for these kids and it starts right now.
My Jerusalem offered up "Sweet Chariot" in 2009, a rich mixture of Wilco, The National, and Beulah. Organ, rich strings, shabby guitars, and 3am-Marlboro-Red vocals collide in a tweaking, shaking chorus. The best moment, however, is the eponymous bridge. "We will not suffer the mistakes of our fathers/Sweet chariot take us away" becomes the repeated edict to go with a tide of building sound. The strings churn from the below and finally, a double-tapped rhythm section as we reach a thrashing catharsis. Just like that, the song fades into nothingness and is gone.
There is this moment in "The Rain Becomes The Clouds" somewhere in the final third, right before the final chorus where the singer intones: "As winter ends and spring begins/with summer winds off in the distance/pushing in, they move us." Focus on "move us." The singer's voice tumbles down three or four notes in an eye-blink. The strings are soaring behind him as he continues to insist in the chorus, a metaphor rooted in the water cycle, that "the rain becomes the clouds." Emanuel and the Fear sound like a Rufus Wainwright take on Sufjan Stevens but with something more hopeful, more desperate and more propulsive; something designed specifically to move us.
Egyptian Hip Hop were neither hip-hop nor were they obviously Egyptian in 2009. In the world of indie rock names, this should not surprise us. What was surprising was the explosion of vocals and melody that stumbled out of the headphone jack. The first lyrics, after a shimmering, post-punk intro, give a mighty debt to New Order's "Temptation" chorus of "Up, down, turn around/please don't let me hit the ground." In the world of Egyptian Hip Hop, the melody is almost identical but the lyrics begin "What are we today?" It is a useful question for a band with a non-sequitur for a name.
The Joy Formidable released one of the best records of 2009, A Balloon Called Moaning, gave it away for free through NME and still didn't get enough press. The signature song is "Cradle" a charging, industrial rock joint. A sing-song melody in the verses gives way to a driving, nearly tribal chorus. The lyrics, hard to make out, are a repeating "My vicious tongue/cradles just one." It is violent and sexual and ambiguous. But when "Cradle" finishes, you only have one moment stuck your mind; the first lyrics, "I can see he says what he means," in perfect, alternating hi-fi.
"Luna" is a story in two-parts. From the jump, Fanfarlo charges out of the gate like an in medias resArcade Fire. Instead of waiting for the charging second-movement, "Luna" opens at a sprint. This doesn't leave the band much room to grow, making the whole song into a brilliant comedown. By the end, we've slowed to a near waltz, miles from the initial burst. None of this is to say, "Luna" is poorly conceived. Rather, it is a different construction built heavy on the front and light on the back. But each movement, the slamming first two-minutes and the slow-drive final two-and-a-half, has its own narrative and ultimately leaves us feeling complete.
From the opening snare hits, through the soaring chord progression, "Young Adult Friction" does more than describe what its lurid and, presumably, metaphorical title intimates. Pains Of Being Pure At Heart seem to describe something less intimate and more public. You feel surrounded by people, by movement, by the thing you came here to see. The plea for earnesty gets deeper in the song's final movement, as they repeat, "Don't check me out/don't check me out." By the final, slamming conclusion and its echoing finale, you've experienced a case for intimacy and a case for public interaction - sitting right next to each other, kissing, we presume, in the privacy of a million strangers.
A vocal loop is the assaulting opener for Two Door Cinema Club'sslamming single "I Can Talk." This is the first unveiling. The track then takes off in a speedy direction, calling to mind the high-fret-board moments of Editors, before settling into the twitchy, angular guitar sound that TDCC is deservedly known for. This is something different, returning to find a massive chorus with the title, "I Can Talk" squarely as its centerpiece. The arrangement rises, the vocal loop returns and these little, almost frail, falsetto vocals scream out from the maw. The down-beat might break your neck because it is, quite simply, one of the biggest moments of year.
The Joy Formidable is a tempting bit of pronounciation. Is it the strict and tight English version? The. Joy. Formidable. Or is it the French, loose and mouth-full-of-marbles? Four-me-da-bleu. La Joix Formidable. It's possible.
But forget what the name sounds like, the band sounds like a more chunky Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but if Karen O and Nick Zinner split some vocal duties in some kind of boy-girl democracy. It's intense. It's a little over-the-top. It's the kind of thing that could be extremely important in Europe and never make it here at all. So say it how you want to say it. And say it a little louder. The Joy Formidable.
