Big Joanie—Back Home

Last month saw the death of Mimi Parker, drummer and vocalist of the band Low. Parker was one of many women whose vital contribution to shoegaze is too often sidelined for conversations about the genius of pedal-headed men. Shoegaze was quintessentially 90s—a lush and indulgent do-over of the utilitarian post-punk that dominated alternative charts in the previous decade. The UK middle-class was emerging from the dark chrysalis of the Thatcher years into a stranger and more questioning world; a world where joy was suddenly palatable because you didn’t have to be a cabinet member to have it. Shoegaze fit neatly into this depoliticised world. It prioritised sensation over message, bending its massive arrangements over often inaudible vocals. But shoegaze wasn’t just quintessentially 90s—it was feminine, too. Most of the biggest bands in the genre featured women centre stage (something you can’t say about new wave or post-punk). And in public consciousness, shoegaze and the female voice are synonymous.

Now that sound inhabits Back Home, the new album from Big Joanie. This album represents an absolutely enormous shift in sound which greatly elevates the band’s material. As courageous as Big Joanie have been with this course shift, special attention must be lavished on producer Margo Broom, who makes everything heavy as bones but skyward-soaring and ebullient.

Back Home is hook-driven, but neither cheap nor cheesy. Individual songs are colourful and varied without sacrificing sonic or thematic consistency. ‘Insecure’ sounds like the 00s anthem accompanying the clean-up the morning after a Skins party. The track channels that millennial indie style; a sort of family-friendly reinterpretation of punk, all stabbing rhythms and repetition but without any nasty bits. ‘In My Arms’ bookends the other side of punk, its progenitors; it’s a riff-driven surf ballad that plays like a rediscovered Kip Tyler track.

Stephanie Phillips’ vocals are nasal, drawling, almost lackadaisical, which just adds to the grungey mood. They work particularly well with songs like ‘Confident Man’ whose lyrics are shot through with cynicism. Somehow these vocal deliveries have great resonance and clarity too. It’s clear that behind the apparent effortlessness is real craft.

A standout from Back Home is the closer, ‘Sainted’, which is something like a New Order take on krautrock. The track is lifted by a bass drone and a luminous chorus. It’s a fitting capstone for such a strangely celebratory album. Back Home is an emotional two-hander in the same vein as The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; both bounce between pop and pallor, both demonstrate every trick in their respective bands’ books. Up until now Big Joanie had been a band with something really great in their future. With Back Home that future has arrived.

Andrew O’Keefe

Shady Nasty—Bad Posture

With Bad Posture, Australian group Shady Nasty have produced an EP that feels like a bodily experience; one which strongly emphasises tone, power and rich production. Overdriven, half-distinguishable lyrics sail above bass which feels like it’s fracking brain juice from your skull. As a result, the (easy) comparison most will make is to New York punks Show Me the Body. But where SMTB’s lyrics border on the polemical, Shady Nasty’s pack a more confessional punch—and they prove that sometimes, by narrowing the scope, you can hit a target twice as hard.

There’s a natural desire to make reviews comprehensive, broad and detailed. But Shady Nasty nail the fundamentals so completely here, function so symbiotically, it barely needs to be said. Instead, I’ll waste even more words trying in vain to describe how gargantuan this EP’s sound is. Earlier this year, Abronia’s The Whole of Each Eye placed the deserts of desert rock—vacuums which demand legends—front-and-centre. Bad Posture feels like those same deserts, but crisped and shimmering in the haze of global warming; as hot as the hood of a car left sat in the sun. It’s that heaviness everyone is aiming for, the one you need to turn up and down in equal measure. If ears could squint, that’s what they’d be doing.

This is music which rejects genre labels, sprawled comfortably across multiple styles, for which “rap-rock”, “punk”, “post-hardcore” feel reductive—even insulting. Bad Posture is experiential, raw, technically faultless and impeccably recorded. As accessible as they are unfamiliar, Shady Nasty have established themselves as a band with hundreds of miles of road ahead of them.

Bad Posture will be released on Feb 21st. Listen to ‘Jewellery’ here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Trupa Trupa — Remainder

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski of Trupa Trupa made a startling discovery in 2015. In a pine forest, nuzzled next to the former Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, was a cache of buried shoes.

In modern Poland it is an offence to accuse national authorities or Polish citizens of having a role in the extermination of the Jews. But the thousands of shoes Kwiatkowski found buried there tell a different story altogether. A perfect representation, he argues, of Poland's reticence to exhume the past, or to examine their own place in it.

There is, of course, a fine line to be drawn here. Nazism was not a fun, opt-in summer camp of a regime. But it was built on a house of cards; a precarious structure of individuals denying responsibility. Without this desire to look away, to cover the ugly with earth, it could not have succeeded. And this desire has followed Poland like a spectre into the modern day.

On 'Remainder', Trupa Trupa's new single, Kwiatkowski and co. rail against Holocaust deniers with typical style. The track recalls The Cure's Pornography; it fills you with nervous kinetic energy, while at the same time crushing and nailing you in place. The coldness and warmth of a harsh truth.

Trupa Trupa are not interested in psychoanalysing Holocaust deniers. It is a position much too confusing and complicated to do any justice to in three minutes. Instead, they parody the seductive, simplistic rhetoric of conspiracy theorists, chanting 'It did not take place' over and over like a mantra. To say the effect is disturbing is an understatement.

The strength of this track is that, while it adopts a minimal approach to its topic, it feels clear, cogent and forthright. The past may be a dark and frightening place. But the future is looking brighter courtesy of Trupa Trupa's LP Of the Sun, due this September.

‘Remainder’ is available for purchase from Boomkat here. Alternatively, it’s up on youtube here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe