The Joy Formidable - TheBig Roar

Wed 31st Aug, 2011 in Music Reviews

Anyone hoping to get to grips with up-and-coming Welsh band The Joy Formidable need not go any further than the opening track of their debut album, The Big Roar. The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie takes a while to build up a head of steam, but wow…what a head of steam it is. A minute and a half of drum spasms and guitar washes pass, before a tough, shuffling beat finally kicks in. It’s a song of levels, what you thought was a crescendo turns out to be a plateau on the way to the next, greater crescendo. I lost count of all the different song sections, all the hooks, all the riffs, and I temporarily lost my bearings, as the song-closing wig-out stretched out past the two minute mark.

Bringing to mind Silversun Pickups and The Airborne Toxic Event, The Joy Formidable bring together the seemingly contradictory threads of emotional vulnerability and post-Morissey wordiness with stadium-baiting musical bombast.

Austere builds layer upon layer for its first two minutes, before promptly building some more for its final minute and a half. It starts promisingly enough, with a slinky vocal hook and a glam bass-and-drums stomp, but soon enough these strong elements are lost amongst the multi-tracked drums. Overblown to my tastes, it must nonetheless be acknowledged that this endless build is expertly executed. This stuff probably goes off like a bomb live, but there’s just something a little impersonal about it.

The biggest issue with The Big Roar is perhaps the yawning gap where lead singer Ritzy Bryan’s voice should be taking control of the songs. Though her voice is serviceable, her melodic choices are canny, and her lyrics add depth to the material, she is rendered as a luxury item, a glacé cherry atop a mountainous pile of roiling, seething riffage. It is partially a simple issue of lack, of presence and charisma, but beyond that is the sense that these songs were designed, rather than written, that these songs were forged in the fires of endless, titanic jam sessions, with every wake-the-dead power chord and wake-Keith Moon drum fill having been painstakingly constructed before the idea of lyrics even occurred to anyone.

In The Joy Formidable’s defence, these problems mightn’t be in the DNA of these songs so much as in the mix job of notable cheese-rock producer Rich Costey (Foo Fighters, Muse, Jane’s Addiction), who has so obliterated the band’s North Wales origins that most would be forgiven for making the assumption that The Joy Formidable were the latest Alt Rock-lite hype band out of Silver Lake, LA.

For instance, there is definitely a beating heart powering the foolishly-titled Llaw = Wall, a nice, (relatively) understated rock stomp. Sung by bass player Rhydian Dafydd (did I mention these guys are Welsh?), it remains within itself, succeeding on the strength of its songcraft, rather than bravado.

There is fun to be had on The Big Roar, but one is left craving some substance to go with all the style, the gloss and the ear-candy. Frustratingly, there might be something under there, but it’s impossible to say for sure. Still, cheap thrills have their proponents, and they will find all that they are seeking in this The Big Roar.