Joyce Manor piece together relics from their cult career past and present on ‘40 oz. to Fresno’
Capturing their tongue-in-cheek laments with usual brevity, Joyce Manor look inspired by their own past songwriting talents to make for a satisfying sixth full-length.
Photo: Press
It’s wrong to consider Joyce Manor stuck within their indie-rock roots. In fact, the Torrance natives have served up beachside vignettes channelled through many styles since 2011.
A small recap: the emo-reviving S/T conjured up gang vocal anthems about mall restaurant soft drinks and ashtray petting zoos. Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired covered The Buggles and threw more left turns in a thirteen-minute time span than the conclusion of a Lynchian drama. Pop-punk party regrets found their place in the masterpiece Never Hungover Again. Cody went a bit shoegazey. Kurt Ballou was employed for the amplified Million Dollars to Kill Me which turned out to be his — and Joyce Manor’s — most sugary sweet and straightforward production. Rarities, occasionally of the shouty ilk, made up Songs from Northern Torrance.
Where to go with a sixth full-length then? Clocking in at around seventeen minutes, the trio haven’t completely redefined any part of their sound this time. 40 oz. to Fresno draws on puzzle pieces left aside throughout their career. Presumably a nod to rekindling the cult fame that the band has maintained through its career, there are pinched acoustic-punk debris from days of yore, half-page lyric sheets for crowd singalongs, and playful song structures that prove Barry Johnson’s chops for hitting catchy notes has never been proven through big choruses alone.
Oh yeah, and a cover by a Wirral-based band to start the album off. Souvenir, originally performed by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, is a whopping 3 minutes long and transfers measured spangly electro-pop to amp feedback and crunching guitars. It works well as a rerendering and layered euphoria from the get-go.
Just once you’re drilled into yelling the song title and chorus-call of rollicking NBTSA, I think there’s a theremin on Reason to Believe which sounds like a less cheesy slower cut from Weezer’s early noughties albums. A saddening musician’s decline is detailed in You’re Not Famous Anymore. The record’s two singles Don’t Try and Gotta Let It Do are peak Joyce Manor — the former’s instruments sway with each other in the verses before locking into the straightforward strumming of the choruses, whether palm-muted or ringing out. The latter will get the sweaty bar crowd going with a starting burst of energy, oi-oi-ois and high-pitched word endings.
The positive-sounding Dance With Me is anything but; looking to shrug off personal tragedy and climate change issues by jigging worldly problems with a partner away as much as possible. After this whirl through a range of Johnsonisms, most notably is a humorous yet lonely stanza: “Look at me yelling love is free / Then why is everybody always stealing shit from Best Buy? / Could it be that the room’s empty? / and I’m just tearing out my heart for the sound guy?”. Cue guitar solo!
An effortless passing through blink-and-you’ll-miss-them song lengths containing so many elements (lead axe noodling and laments on life experience, whether witty or cynical) is not to be scoffed at. Basically like Robert Pollard within the SoCal scene. Secret Sisters comes pretty close to a Guided By Voices tune, to be fair. It’s another record that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Instead, it demands you to replace the needle at the start or hit the ‘enable repeat’ button (other streaming services are available).
With the album title a play on the excellent Sublime debut, the Californian coastliners take the name and downbeat melancholia straight out of Bradley Newell’s rulebook to conclude that life’s not really a beach when you think about it. Even if you might sound happy. Sometimes.