by Sara Mae (@veryverynoisy)
Joyer’s third studio album, Night Songs, out with Hit the North Records / Julia's War Records, has found a new skyline–the street lamps whipping by from car windows. Written primarily while on tour, the album is a sound palette of cold air clarity, infused with the big feelings of brief connections and star gazing aliveness. Recorded at Big Nice Studio (Horse Jumper of Love, Squirrel Flower) and mixed at Drop of Sun Studios (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza), this record, in content and in form, celebrates kinship found through music.
There is a confidence to the record – one single, “Star,” almost sounding like it begins in media res, in the middle of the story (a camping trip with the band Kitchen), the wall of noise on “Softer Skin” that gives way to a creeping guitar tempo. It sounds like when you let yourself out the back of the party, behind the apartment building, and you’re alone with the night garden that has cropped up in the otherwise urban surroundings. There’s a softness in the lyrics, a sort of thawing: “Prettier hair and head and teeth and lips, insides / Nicest boy in the world / Can feel your hands and hips and chest and tongue and fur.” You can tell they wrote a lot of this record while touring through New England, chilly doom tones in the introductory “Night Song,” somewhere between Alex G and Boston’s Alexander, the chorus pedal and vocal reverb on “Rings a Bell” bring a heaviness like wearing your winter coat in the back of the venue.
The melodies in “Fall Apart” are intimate, sentimental – they’re so catchy that to listen is to recognize a feeling you forgot you had. This isn’t a coming of age record but there is a sort of initiation in the themes of it. “Fall Apart” has lyrics about the driving sensations of being a young person: “I want to do the things that make me fall apart / Grinding my teeth, grin at the wallpaper / I went out back to feel a lot safer / I want to do the things that make me fall apart.” The sheeny guitars in “Wake Up” are reminiscent of a noisy Beach Fossils show. What sounds like a mellotron at the end balanced by an insistent guitar riff — it feels close to the Ferris Bueller line, that life comes at you fast.
Joyer’s slowcore foundations reveal themselves on “777.” The slide and sweetness make this a really memorable track, the changing tempos between a tinny, nursery rhyme sort of bridge, alternating with a dirty guitar strum. “Try” has Joyer’s characteristic wet weirdness, opening with a bending guitar, finding some resonance with the elastic sounding guitar walk-up at the end of “Silver Moon.” “Drive All Night” has a persistent drum beat, and builds on a honeyed droning vocal, sometimes interrupted by an abrasive guitar. The album’s final track, “Mason Dixon” has a windy ambience and a slightly chunky quality of distortion that forces the listener to sit with the song differently, to pay closer attention. Joyer’s sound is strange, eerie at times, but also incredibly melodic. It is deeply easy listening, good company to have. This album is a triumph, the final stretch of a road trip, the royal blue sky just before darkness, erupting above.