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HOT OFF THE PRESS (#20) - Little Joy & Danielson
It’s
Wednesday, and that means it’s time for Nick Courtright’s weekly first
glance at music discovered in the last seven days, whether it be
just-released, just-leaked, or some long-lost gem that has remained
under the radar. Click here for other recent editions of Hot Off the Press, featuring acts such as
Deerhunter, TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Cold War Kids, of Montreal,
Juana Molina, Crystal Stilts, Final Fantasy, Peter Bjorn & John,
White Denim, and Grizzly Bear.
Little Joy – Little Joy
released November 4th on Rough Trade
Report Card: B
So here’s a list of things I thought when I first encountered Little Joy’s eponymous debut:
1. Finally! A band has actually followed in the vein created by The Strokes’ Is This It without sounding grossly derivative! It sure has taken long enough!
2. Or even maybe, this is the album The Strokes should have come
out with the last time around, rather than merely aping their own sound
and relying on dull, lifeless verse-chorus-verse and refusing to move
beyond the year 2001!
3. Wow, sometimes that female vocalist sounds a bit like Nico—I bet you
a million bucks Andy Warhol would have just loved this album!
So I took these first impressions and enjoyed Little Joy as a not-necessarily-innovative but still simply satisfying listening endeavor. But then I found out a little more about the band. Turns out that the drummer is in fact Strokes-oriented. Actually, he’s Fabrizio Moretti, also known as the drummer from The Strokes. So there goes that sense of lineage originality—the lineage was there, for sure, but was no accident, thus making Little Joy’s musical inspiration a little less dynamic. To make it worse, Little Joy lead singer Rodrigo Amarante sometimes even sounds like much loved and much hated Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas. Toss in Little Joy’s third member, Binki Shapiro, and what you have there is a bunch of strange names for your next child. What is less interesting than that, though, is that when Shapiro sounds like Nico, the Warhol allusion is unfortunately made grad school-ishly apparent by the band’s naming of track nine: “How to Hang a Warhol.”
So, put all that in a basket and shake it around and what you’ve got is some world class hipsterism. But if that overload of skinny-jeaned kitsch—along with some lovely-but-unspectacular melodic harmonizing and acoustic guitar—doesn’t get you excited, then Little Joy probably will provide you with even less than its name suggests.
Listen to music by Little Joy here
Danielson – Trying Hartz
released November 11th on Secretly Canadian
Report Card: B
Made up of members of crazy-voiced frontman Daniel Smith’s family, plus anyone else enlisted for evangelicism, Danielson offered an almost-ridiculous-not-to-like head-bob-ability with breakthrough album Ships, an album made more than a decade into the band’s existence. With that long gestation period, curiosity regarding the development of the band has resulted in Trying Hartz, a packaging of notables from the band’s back catalog that demonstrates the sometimes-annoying evolution of the act from backyard slapdash to refined tune-ism. And this old-song survey presents the argument that unabashedly religious Danielson’s old material was, in fact, far more preachy and prone to moralist declarations than Ships, leading the conclusion-jumper to think the absence of such would-be offenders was the reason the breakthrough album actually broke through.
A further investigation, though, reveals that the old stuff just isn’t as rich as the newer material—the songs are less complete, more fragmented, and the instrumentation often rings a bit pale in comparison to the depth of sound found in the band’s newer work. Still, there are still gems here, and if you can disregard the band’s dogma (and Smith’s high-pitched glee-screams) and put it all in perspective, it may be possible to survive early Danielson’s ideological forcefulness, and, at times, their sheer “fortified compound in the middle of nowhere” scariness, and get to the goodness beneath.
Postponing visceral reactions to the words, sure enough, provides the listener with what is often a fascinating and refreshingly iconoclastic approach to large-scale joy-pop, and sheds light on the growth of the act into one that could make an album as stunning and satisfying as Ships. Songs such as “Body English,” “A No No,” and smile-worthy sing-along “Don’t You Be the Judge,” add breadth to the band’s image, and while there are some misses here—it seems like giving listeners a solid 15-18 tracks would have been a better option than this two-disc 28 track onslaught—altogether this is a nice glimpse into the formative period of one of today’s most eyebrow-raising acts. If anything, it makes it all the more compelling to consider what comes next for the troupe.
Listen to music by Danielson here
Read more of Nick Courtright’s writing here