by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
Sometimes you want to listen to something fun. Music that is fun to hear. Music that was most likely fun to make. Spread Joy always seem as though they’re having fun, bending art punk to the point of snapping just as they bounce back. The grooves are elastic, the music is tight, there’s a deranged sensibility to it all. Delight abounds. After a four year absence, the Chicago based quartet are set to release their new album III on September 4th via Feel It Records (The Drin, Team Work, Why Bother?), a record that bursts with chaotic energy and unfiltered spikes of exuberance. It’s as strange as it is wonderful, trilling and contorting in a dizzy whirlwind of post-punk boogie and Briana Hernandez’s brilliantly unpredictable vocal melodies. Chirping one moment and silky the next, Spread Joy leap from one moment to the next, crafting their magic in short bursts of spirited fun.
After sharing the light-speed blurring “Pygmalion,” Spread Joy move with a relatively more relaxed pace on their latest single, “Iambic Pentameter” (which, for the record, does not seem to be written in iambic pentameter). Opening with a seasick tension and a layer of squealing guitar noise, the song comes bursting into its razor sharp rhythm, clearing the pallet and cleaning the overall tone before the song’s limbs expand in opposing directions. Wiggly and corrosive at the same time, “Iambic Pentameter” clashes between motorik repetition and no wave detachment. Hernandez uses the opportunity to allow her vocals room to wander, stretched and pulled at times only to swirl back in an tornado of animated pitches that brings alien life to otherwise non-alien words about professors of social studies and office hours. It’s everything we love about Spread Joy and the video, animated and directed by Elyse Johnson is every bit as triumphantly weird to match (watch the eyes long enough and you’d swear they’re looking back at you).