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When this mighty Welsh/English trio headlined Manhattan’s spacious Terminal 5 in front of 3,000 punters last March, I wondered if the days of seeing of them again in an intimate venue were…well, terminal. But here they were eight short months later, playing this much smaller, 400-capacity Gowanus art/performance space, which not surprisingly sold out in a heartbeat. (They also played a free, half-hour RSVP-only set at Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel a few days earlier.) Perpetually cheery, polite, doe-eyed singer Ritzy Bryan looked stylish as ever in a white-laced minidress and black leggings/boots. But like the deceptive Dr. Jekyll, the friendly frontwoman morphed into a ferocious Mr. Hyde-like guitar monster once each song started.
Aided by her mounds of effects pedals, Bryan’s hurricane-force riffs were further bolstered by her boyfriend bassist Rhydian Dafydd’s nimble, robust licks and lanky drummer Matt Thomas’s frenzied, thunderous pounding (defying convention, Thomas positions his drum kit along the front of the stage to Bryan’s left, not behind the band). At this show, my tenth time seeing them, they introduced four new songs from their upcoming second LP Wolf’s Law. Only one of those, the weighty “Maw Maw Song,” was unfamiliar to me – it had a ‘70s blues-rock feel that made me initially think it must be a cover, so different did it sound from anything in their canon. Two other new ones, the pretty, lilting “Cholla” and the more hard-driving, windswept (literally: see the duststorm-themed video!) “This Ladder is Ours,” had been released as singles, while the atypically hushed, acoustic “Silent Treatment” previously made an appearance at the Terminal 5 show.
Of course, no Joy Formidable show is complete without an airing of their debut The Big Roar‘s “Big Four,” i.e., that awe-inspiring quartet of tunes they’ve now played at all ten shows I’ve seen: the melancholy yet elevating “The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade”, the pulverizing highlight “Austere” (tonight’s version lulled us in with a quiet interlude midway, before knocking us over with it’s monstrous climax), the euphoric “Cradle,” and the anarchic, instrument-thrashing closer “Whirring” (which began with Bryan crooning a snippet of Elvis Costello’s “Just a Memory,” from his 1980 fourth LP Get Happy!!). The band rounded out the set with equally punishing Big Roar killers “I Don’t Want to See You Like This,” “A Heavy Abacus,” and “The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie,” adding A Balloon Called Moaning EP’s (more like a mini-LP) dreamy “Ostrich” for good measure.
Perhaps the newer songs’ mild reduction in volume — and the omission of some live favorites like “Greyhounds in the Slips,” “The Magnifying Glass,” and “Buoy” — kept this show from being as brain-shattering as some of their best previous gigs (like their cataclysmic post-1AM blitzkrieg at Princeton, NJ’s Terrace F. Club in March 2011, for starters). But that’s somewhat akin to comparing Mount St. Helens’ volcanic eruption with that of Mount Vesuvius. Like those lava-belching behemoths, let’s just say they blew us to smithereens, yet again.
