The major label debut by The Joy Formidable, The Big Roar, was something of a defining moment of 2011 rock that instantly carried a listener back to the glorious moments of 1990s alternative rock. Careening loud-quiet dynamics, blaring dissonance coupled with delicate melodies, Ritzy Bryan’s keening vocals — it was like the 1990s had never died, even as the audience for guitar-based rock was plunging into an abyss. I saw them twice in that tour and once at a weird benefit show at a DC church on November 10, 2012 — coincidentally, seven years to the date before their recent tour at the Black Cat. A Joy Formidable show around 2011-2012 was all superlatives: brashly thrilling, bludgeoningly loud, sometimes dangerously monochromatic in its eagerness to overwhelm an audience, but scarcely ever close to boring.
The Joy Formidable have probably never been bigger than they were after The Big Roar and its subsequent year’s record, Wolf’s Law. They were on big vampire-movie soundtracks and TV appearances and opening for Foo Fighters. Since that point they have been a bit quieter, releasing an underappreciated album Hitch, returning to Wales (no band has been more unapologetically Welsh in decades — they do Facebook Live videos in Welsh), and they released an oddly titled record, Aaarth, in September 2018. (Aaarth is the misspelled Welsh word for “bear” and sounds like coughing up phlegm.)
Touring at the Black Cat, in a town where The Joy Formidable enjoy a dedicated fanbase (Ritzy Bryan lived in DC as an au pair, and got engrossed in the DC punk scene, explaining the 2012 benefit show at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Church), the band opened with Wolf’s Law favorite “This Ladder Is Ours,” a riveting keyboard-based tune quite unlike much of their post-shoegaze blare. The initial setlist was very heavy on Aaarth, a record that deliberately accented the Joy Formidable’s weirder edges, like “Y Bluen Eira” and “Cicada,” although they didn’t skimp on some of the thunderous tracks that formed their reputation in The Big Roar, “The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade” and “A Heavy Abacus.” But it was a weird set overall, one that felt long even as the list of songs was a relatively brief one, heavy on Aaarth and A Balloon Called Moaning, rather than The Big Roar and Wolf’s Law. I suspect many in the audience were less familiar with the new material, as was I, and the band was playing partly for its own benefit. “The Wrong Side” is the most direct new song, a surprising gritty power ballad calling that empathy that swirls into mounds of feedback and noise.
The three-song encore was an odd one too, with Wolf’s Law’s “The Leopard and the Lung,” the new “The Better Me,” and only as a closer their full-bore stadium banger, “Whirring,” which sends crowds into hysterics and was The Big Roar’s bid for mass stardom. It may never have had the impact it deserved (if it had been released at the heyday of Oasis or Alanis Morissette or Belly or Smashing Pumpkins, it would've sold in the millions) but it’s still a massively thrilling rock song by any standard. But the band still skipped a lot of their best-known material in what could either be considered a display of selfishness or simply idiosyncrasy.
Since this was the closing show of that leg of an American tour, and since this was something of a hometown gig for The Joy Formidable, the Black Cat offered a special after-show party DJed by members of the band. So, late into the night, a small number of diehards hung around the Black Cat back bar, awaiting the band members. It turns out that DJing in this case meant that the menfolk of The Joy Formidable plugged their phones into a small speaker system and passed around bottles of beer and whiskeys with the crowd, while Ritzy Bryan made an abbreviated but enthusiastic appearance. Still, pretty much everyone likes vintage Bowie and LCD Soundsystem and the Beastie Boys, and even tolerated the boys’ enthusiasm for Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” and Scandinavian death metal.
Credit should be given to opener Tancred, a solidly entertaining rock band with thoughtful songs and lots of charisma from singer and songwriter Jess Abbott. Nothing was exactly novel, and the band owes a lot to late-90s alt-rock (even in its most anodyne, pop-oriented moments), but “Queen of New York” proved a memorable earworm that later made it into my 2018 list of best songs.
Setlist: [
www.setlist.fm]
Post Edited (02-25-19 14:01)
