Perhaps this is the point – when an album goes from gummy 60s pop (Please Don’t Leave This Town) to something approaching thrash metal (Grin Without Smile) surely the only goal is to disorientate.ĭespite this, when Segall and Presley hit their sweet spot, Joy is not without (cough) its joys. At times, it provides an experience close to channel-hopping through a lot of very similar sounding transistor radio stations. With songs broken up by brief and throwaway interstitials and intros, just as melodies, riffs and jams start to make sense they move on to something else. Joy, on the other hand seems sprawling at 15, and yet feels like it packs in fewer new ideas and certainly less fleshed-out ones. Hair was a tight, eight-track thrill ride and ranks up there with both artists’ best releases. ‘Joy’ is like a rickety wooden rollercoaster – there are a few nice inclines with some mildly disappointing drops between some pulsating flats, and you end up getting off slightly begrudgingly.Segall and Presley have been here before, and it's with that previous record ( Hair) in mind that this new album, Joy, feels, if not a disappointment, like a follow up that falls short. ‘Joy’ is scattered with weird pitch-shifting and stereo effects, and leitmotifs like “We see oceans, baby blue” and the rattly riff on ‘Please Don’t Leave This Town’ and ‘Body Behaviour’ bring together what could otherwise feel a bit directionless, turning it into something more cyclical. There is a strange synchrony, telepathy maybe, in their “shared individuality”. Noting song lengths is rarely productive, but here they definitely speak, not to any of kind of studied intensity, nor to the fruits of a particularly sprawling jam session, but to two musicians simply having a good time or “calling themselves from inside the house”, as they put it. It doesn’t bode well for the next track, ‘My Friend’, but it eventually tends towards some tasty guitar work.
Ditto for ‘Tommy’s Place’, whose ending’s acrobat’s ta-da can only draw faint applause. ‘Rock Flute’ is as bad as its title suggests, though these 30 seconds obviously don’t detract from the record. It sits nicely alongside the spidery stomp of ‘Hey Joel, Where You Going With That?’, which louchely engages with the surreal in lines like “please blow your horn… yellow sandwich submarine… makes me cry like a fly”.
On ‘Other Way’ some pretty funny dog barks segue into one of the album’s heaviest and best moments.
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