Am I lucky or what? While jogging this morning in the streets of Silver Lake, I have found Joyce Manor’s new CD! I knew that the band had hidden copies of their latest album ‘Never Hungover Again’ on bus benches plastered with the album cover, but finding it like that, just a day after attending their performance at Amoeba was a sort of serendipity moment. These bench ads had been there for quite some time, and I was convinced the CDs were long gone! But you know the song, it is true that nobody walks in Los Angeles, so I still had all my chances apparently. I didn’t even have to look very hard, the CD was lying there, close to a bench along Hyperion avenue.
It is a very simple object, times when CDs were coming with a lyrics-booklet inside are well over, I am streaming it right now, and listening to Barry Johnson’s throaty vocals that were resonating inside Amoeba yesterday night. So you tell me that these hundreds of kids who had lined up hours before the show didn’t find the CD on Hyperion? I feel special and a bit wily… There was a guy who was hiding envelopes full of cash all over the place in the same area a few weeks ago, and I have never found one, but a CD? I have no problem finding it, go figure.
I saw a lot of Green Day and Weezer comparisons in reviews, but I can’t really say that these bands cross my mind when listening. Sure there is this heavy sing-along-anthem theme all over the album, which may be sounds even more obvious for songs like ‘Victoria’ (a song that some girl was repeatedly requesting in vain at Amoeba yesterday) but some songs are different, they pass this pop-punk label and move into a form of very poppy and melodic hardcore, as if Joyce Manor were the little brothers of the Descendents? I know everyone compare them to the Smiths, and, at first, it didn’t really make sense to me, Morrissey doesn’t sing that fast! However, I understand it with ‘Heated Swimming Pool’,… this one is very Smiths-like, plus lyrics like ‘I want a heart tattoo/I want it to hurt really bad/That’s how I’ll know/I’ll know it’s real/A real tattoo’ (‘Heart Tattoo’), or ‘Never really had a drug phase/So you think you’re fucking miserable now?’ (‘Catalina Fighting Song’), or ‘I wish you would have died in high school/so you could be somebody’s idol’ (‘Heated Swimming Pool’) are kind of hilarious and transpire this sort of doomed romanticism and loneliness. The lyrics are also full of local Southern California references (‘Schley’ for example is a bus stop around Anaheim), reinforcing the attraction and making the songs more personal for us living there.
The whole album feels like a celebration of youthful passion with witty lines, plenty of hooks, lots of bleeding tattooed hearts and some intense emo going on…. May be it is a bit repetitive? Yeah, but it is so short you don’t even have time to figure it out. It’s their first album for Epitaph and they were playing at the El Rey with Tony Molina on Friday night. I didn’t go but the show was probably chaotic with the usual crowd surfing, since a lot of the kids I saw at Amoeba were the type I see at any punk/hardcore show… Ready to physically respond to the band’s tantrums, although Joyce Manor puts some emotion in the middle of all this anger, and this makes everything a bit more complicated. Anyway, if you are in LA, look for these Joyce Manor benches and hunt for a ‘Never Hungover Again’ CD!
