JOYCE MANOR - 40 oz. TO FREZNO
Joyce Manor have been one the most influential bands in the pop-punk/punk scene since they released their first self-titled record in 2013.
Songs like ‘Constant Headache’ and ‘Beach Community’ immediately tugged at the hairs of Tumblr bloggers and DIY Punk kids with Barry Johnson's heartfelt and blunt lyrics and the thrashy guitars and Smiths-Esque pop melodies.
The influence from The Smiths would be more felt on their Sophomore record, Of All The Things I Will Soon grow Tired, with songs like ‘See how Tame I can Be’ and ‘Violent Inside’, before the band seemingly found the true fusion of their Punk and Indie rock influences with their third record, Never Hungover Again.
At this point in the bands' discography, you could listen to all three albums on an hour-long drive. The band then followed with Cody where the songwriting seemed to mature somewhat from the classic (and always successful) traditional pop-punk structure with songs like ‘Stairs’ and the first truly calm Joyce Manor song, ‘Do you Really Want to Not Get Better’. However, when the band followed with Million Dollars to Kill Me, it seemed that they had almost returned to their roots, now with a bigger emphasis on pop melodies and song structure.
It’s no surprise that 40 oz. To Fresno is the band’s poppiest record to date, but with years of writing songs and playing exhaustingly energetic and sweaty sets to writhing crowds the band do well to maintain what it was that made them such an engaging and exciting band on their early albums. Joyce Manor are now playing on much bigger stages to much bigger audiences, it seems only natural that their sound would evolve to one more inclusive of the general Alternative music fan.
And that’s not a bad thing. 40 oz. To Fresno is packed full of great tracks, like ‘Reason to Believe’, which comes in at a whopping 1 minute 25 seconds in length, and ‘Dance With Me’, perhaps one of their poppiest and, unsurprisingly, most danceable songs to date (and also sounds remarkably like Bowling For Soup’s ‘1985’). What is, however, the most surprising song on this album is the opening track ‘Souvenir’, a fantastic cover of the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark song from 1981.
While the band are no strangers to the power of a good cover, for example, The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ from Of All The Things I Will Soon Grow Tired and recently ‘Helena’ by My Chemical Romance and Tigers Jaw’s ‘I saw Water’ at various live performances, their choice of covers seem to suggest that the band know who they are and the music that influenced them, but also who their fans are and what they would be most excited to hear. You can hear that on 40 oz., the band stick to their old ways in song length, album-length, and structure, with one song even possibly being a sequel to an earlier song with ‘You’re Not Famous Anymore’ seemingly picking up where ‘Famous Friend’, from their self-titled record, left off.
‘Gotta Let it Go’, the single from 40 oz. To Fresno that has been stuck in my head ever since I heard it, is classic Joyce Manor. The oily, round, bass guitar hammers underneath a repeated Lead guitar phrasing and thrash chords while Barry Johnson barks in harmony with Bassist Matt Ebert. Barry isn’t as lyrically deft as he has been in the past on this record, there are no sore points or bizarre lines that come from nowhere, like in the past on ‘Big Lie’ from Million Dollars to Kill Me: ‘Girls can be kind of controlling/ I want to be controlled, I think it’d be alright’.
Where Joyce Manor struggle with this album is the inability to stand out from the rest of their discography. 40 oz. To Fresno doesn’t sound or feel all that different to Million Dollars To Kill Me, and it doesn’t come close to the magic they struck with their first three records or the excitement in the experimentation found on Cody. The band have been churning out great albums under the 30-minute mark since 2012, and while they can still write a great record, it feels like it’s time for a change.
Adam Blackwell
★★★☆☆