I fell in love with the The Joy Formidable’s break-out song “Whirring” the very first time I heard it. The droning guitars, delicate vocals, and lush layers of noise behind a pop hook reminded me of all the things I loved about shoegaze. The album The Big Roar was a fantastic debut that set the stage for a band I thought I’d be listening to for years to come, if they somehow managed to survive the shift that was going on in the music industry. See in early 2011 a make-shift revival of noisy pop flavored shoegaze was around the corner. Hearing reverb heavy harmonies and wall after wall of distorted guitars, sounded fresh and exciting. Within the next couple years, many other bands would see success using the same structure.
However, that was 2011. This is 2016. Within those five short years, we’ve seen shoegaze go from interesting, then shoved down our throats, and now as boring as watching paint dry. As much as I love the genre, it’s become apparent that my rediscovered love was being seen through the rose colored lenses of nostalgia goggles. Without sounding hypocritical, I’m well aware I’ve recently gushed about how much I love the nostalgic elements of Yuck’s latest record, and even insinuated that it’s already one of my favorite releases of the year. But nostalgia has to be done properly in order for it to work.
On The Joy Formidable’s second album, Wolf’s Law, they delivered an ambitious prog rock opus that had more in common with Muse than My Bloody Valentine. They utilized the big budget of being on a major label sparing no expense and even hired a full string arrangement to flesh out their sound. I gave them props for expanding on their sound but sadly, Wolf’s Law did nothing for me. The over produced bloat took away everything I loved about The Big Roar.
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fter an extended break and stepping away from the major label, The Joy Formidable have returned with their third LP Hitch. From the start it’s good to see how they turned the ambition down a little bit and sort of went back to the drawing board on their signature sound. The one-two punch of “A Second In White” and “Radio Lips” show promise from the start, and even though the vocals are a bit close in the mix for my taste, it sounded as if the band I fell in love with, were back and ready to right the wrongs they did on the Wolf’s Law…
Sadly, I was mistaken. Those two songs are the peak of the entirety of Hitch. There are a few moments here and there like melancholy synth heavy ballad “The Gift,” and the stellar closing tack “Don’t Let Me Know” but that’s not enough to make what I would call a good album. In fact the bad song to good song ratio is one of the biggest issues I have with the album. Twelve songs is a pretty meaty tracklisting for an album these days, but most of these songs average out to be around six minutes each. The only exception is the aforementioned “The Gift” which is just a shade over three minutes, but more than half of that song is a guitar solo. It comes off very indulgent and pretentious. It really seems to be a growing trend with a lot of these shoegaze revival bands.
The Joy Formidable start off with something that stirs the overwhelming sense of nostalgia, but abuse it to the level where it loses all of it’s magic through repetition.
Hitch doesn’t have the baggage of wanting to be an epic concept album like Wolf’s Law and for the most part, takes it back to the sonic level of The Big Roar, but aside from the overly long jams and lack of legitimate hooks, there is still something missing from the album that’s hard to place. From a production standpoint, it sounds as ifT he Joy Formidable produced it themselves opposed to the glossy finish ofWolf’s Law, but it still doesn’t hit the right note of authenticity. Almost like they were trying a bit too hard to reboot themselves like some sort of apology for ‘selling out’ on a major label.Hitch is not a bad record by any means and if you haven’t listened to them since their debut, this is a decent enough follow up, but there is nothing here that feels like natural progression. It’s very safe and very average. I’ve listened to it from start to finish quite a few times but excluding the tracks I’ve already mentioned, I can’t place any of the others without hearing them.
I personally think it’s fatigue on the listener’s behalf. The excitement of the shoegaze sound has wore it’s welcome out just as fast as it revitalized itself five years ago. The Joy Formidable stripped away their fancy major label layers to give us what we fell in love with originally, but now that a thousand other bands have given it to us, I’m starting to question if they were really that special in the first place. After listening to Hitch a few times, I went back to The Big Roar for the sake of my own argument. I still enjoyed a few songs, “Whirring” especially, but mostly the apprehensive feeling of confirmation: I’m over modern shoegaze.