Joy Electric

Techno, House, Electronica and their other related genres are often difficult for the average American to get into. It is often because we miss the subtle aesthetic behind them and sonically it can frequently become a tedious experience. Even the most adventurous, experimental audiophile can find serious techno, trance or house to be a bit much after an hour or two. Repetition of the same beat, the same formula for extended periods of time can get on the nerves and quickly become infuriating – unless you’re hopped up on ecstasy. But the most successful acts – think of Brian Eno, the Crystal Method, the Chemical Brothers neè the Dust Brothers, Depeche Mode and others – are successful because they bring a pop music sensibility and formula, making a whole genre of music that can seem cold and inaccessible, extremely accessible through a human element.

Joy Electric’s latest release on Tooth and Nail Records, The Ministry of Archers, attempts to create a unique synthesis of pop-inspired lyrics and sensibility with a religiously deferential harkening to the old school giants of the genre. In the liner notes, Joy Electric proudly boasts that all of the sounds from the blips, beeps and boops that start off the album’s first track, “The Archery Suite,” to the whistling sounds that appear on songs such as “Most Terrible Archer,” were created from analog synthesizers, along with vocals, as it were done during Eno’s first albums. What a good artist will do through his work is to use his work to criticize his predecessors; his use of certain influences while forgoing others is essentially the artist’s intuitive opinion into what he felt had worked, who he had felt did it right, and what didn’t work. But where Joy Electric fails is that instead of providing their own interpretation into their genre, they essentially create a sound that manages to sound incredibly dated and tired. The seemingly dark, gothic thematic structure revolving around archery and other common gothic motifs just seems laughable. And if you pay close attention to the lyrics, they’re often infuriatingly stupid and repetitious.

Most of the songs are frankly boring, plodding, unintelligible and uninspired messes. Songs like “In Intricacies” with its boops, beeps, and blips that somehow manage to sound like a dripping water faucet from a hellish underworld, fails because it doesn’t develop into much of anything and it doesn’t feel like much of a movement towards anything either. “Become as Murders” with its dirge like synthesizer work is an odd song because it adds an ominous feel to the preceding, which wasn’t on any of the other songs. It’s also perhaps the least danceable song on the entire album. And although the album overall is a failure, there are some interesting moments including the frenzied stomp of “A Hatchet, A Hatchet,” or the roundabout vocal experiments of “Quite Quieter Than Spiders” which might remind you of Yes’ “Roundabout.” But two or even three interesting moments does not make a record. Even with some of their previous fanfare, it’s a highly disappointing and frustrating record.