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The Joy Formidable are a band that can’t be watched from a safe distance, and a band that shouldn’t be merely read about. So let me spare you my purple prose for just a minute, and show you some dangerously close photographs.
You’ll quickly notice a couple things in these pictures.
[1] The Joy Formidable smartly reconfigured the Entry’s tight, often limiting stage into a sort of intimate rehearsal space, the drums placed sideways on stage left, so that this was a band whose members fed off each other, rather than extending all their energies outward from the stage. They weren’t playing for the audience. We were just lucky enough to have staked out a privileged position.
[2] This band is scary! They named their live album First You Have To Get Mad, they arrived onstage as a voice extolled WARLOCKS ARE ENEMIES OF GOD! and as an audience member, you feel like you might poison the room like some unholy pox if you don’t remain ferociously committed in your listening at all times. I’ve always figured I wouldn’t have the nerve to meet, or even see, Björk face to face, and now I know it, having nearly passed out every time the wide-open eyes of Ritzy Bryan (a tiny vessel of similarly contained intensity) seemed to make contact with mine.
And so it was that, in an arrangement of triangulated madness, The Joy Formidable saved us from silence on a Wednesday night. They might make you feel they’re not just the best rock band on the planet, but the only real one, as there’s no other band for whom every element is pure sound and motion. (Those are impressions felt in the moment, of course, but in situations like this, the moment is all that matters.)
They only cheated once, during the epic finale of “Whirring,” the immensity of whose iteration on new long-player The Big Roar (infinitely more flabbergasting, somehow, than the already mind-melting version on debut mini-LP A Balloon Called Moaning) they attempted to replicate live. But when the Entry’s sound system suddenly filtered in the jackhammer drumming that on record pushes the song to “the next level,” it felt a little false, as we didn’t come to the show to see what this band can do with overdubs (we already know that’s devastating). We came to see what they demonstrated throughout the rest of their set, that even without the addition of studio trickery, they make a mighty noise.
But beneath the slightly faux sonic plateau of “Whirring,” even, was a band toiling away: Matt Thomas, pummeling through a hailstorm of falling mic stands, the real bones of the song, powerful, precise and intricate all at once, the necessary foundation for the special effects; Ms. Bryan, white hair floating over her array of knobs and pedals; and Rhydian Dafydd, ready to muscle through the same heavy, liquid bass line over and over until the end of time. And time did seem to dilate, but then there was an end, alas, and finally they broke some stuff. So (breathe again, now) no encore.
The band called Mona has a singer who looks like a lost member of The Clash. Their songs would sound good murmured from the lips of a big crowd, and I guess the only reason they’re not playing larger venues outside their native Nashville is that not enough people are yet personally invested. I’m not invested, personally, but I can admit Mona would thrive on a less cramped stage (whereas The Joy Formidable will thrive anywhere, or as a heavy metal band, if they ever become one…).
The leader of the energetic young things known as The Lonely Forest comes from Edina, MN, which must make them one of the better recent emergences from that sunny suburb, not known for its music scene. They’ve studied the Matador flagship bands, it seems, and maybe local favorites The Hold Steady, and if they didn’t soak up any strife in Edina, they must at least have found some heady romance there, as there’s something pretty immediate in their songs.
More Joy:
Setlist:
Greyhounds In The Slips
The Magnifying Glass
Austere
The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade
Cradle
Buoy
I Don’t Want To See You Like This
Whirring
