No Joy (SCQ's Year-End Questionnaire Part II)

Montreal-based rockers No Joy (Laura Lloyd and Jasamine White) popped up on SCQ’s radar completely unannounced last month and quickly sent me deep into Ghost Blonde’s hazy swoon of disaffected guitars. On short notice, White recently set aside some time to talk about the duo's favourite records (both new and old), plus that time they were a song short for their full-length…

SCQ: Every list-lover's favourite question: what are your top albums of 2010? Feel free to include any older yet worthy records you discovered this year.

JW: In absolutely no particular order, some albums that made 2010 totally rad were: Lower Dens 'Twin Hand Movement', Tamaryn 'The Waves', Best Coast 'Crazy for you', The Besnard Lakes 'Are the Roaring Night', as well as Britney Spears' 'In The Zone' and Blink 182's 'Enema of The State' which we recently rediscovered and are just as great as they were in high school.

SCQ: What were you listening to a lot of while recording the excellent Ghost Blonde?

JW: We weren't really listening to anything in particular while we were recording, other than what we were recording!! So I guess while recording Ghost Blonde we were listening to...Ghost Blonde?

SCQ: Be cocky for once in your life: what was the finest thing you did all year? That moment where you actually thought "shit, I nailed that..."?

JW: One of our prouder moments as a band was when Laura drank two 4-loko's before we played a show in California and then strategically transformed those 4-loko cans into shoes and then we played the craziest, shortest set of our career.

SCQ: Effect and Cause: I developed a fever on the cusp of a three-day weekend and fell headlong into the icy cocoon of songs like 'Pacific Pride'. Nothing but tea, Christmas lights and No Joy got me back to health at my own pacing. Okay, your turn: confess a true tale that inspired one of the songs on Ghost Blonde.

JW: It's gonna be hard to top that story, I like hearing we bring people back to health (as opposed to making people sick)

Not one event or thing inspired any song, they are all collections of thoughts and ideas--so its hard to pinpoint. But the title track "Ghost Blonde" was written in a panic when we realized we didnt have enough songs written for the album. I had found a cool delay effect using a combination of pedals. We just kind of jammed around that sound and pressed record...we didn't even really know the structure of the song or how long it would go on for, it was really just written on the spot. Now that's one of our favorite songs on the album. Ok, your story is better.

SCQ: If all the reasonable and implausible ideas in your head came to fruition in 2011, what would they be?

JW: There aren't that many of them I can think of, but I'm pretty sure they all involve Jon Wurster.

Ghost Blonde - No Joy

Ghost Blonde

No Joy
Mexican Summer Records.

SCQ Rating: 82%

The ease with which No Joy operate, as a thrashing punk duo bathing in early 90s sonics, belies the durability of their craft. For one thing, there’s enough sweltering feedback here to fuel a thousand attitude-based rock clichés or, equally, the misconception that Laura Lloyd and Jasamine White’s focus settles somewhere in the tall grass of their shoegaze surface. Ghost Blonde proves those assumptions false, its linear pursuits merely a trapdoor to trip listeners into a fuzz-laden cosmos of songs seemingly rapid-paced and drifting all at once.

That tempo paradox is the great hinge in No Joy’s songwriting machine; offsetting their punk-laced guitar stabs with reflective textures and ethereal vocals which blur along a chord’s creases, Lloyd and White support their scathing performances with a delicate, natural ambience. Fed by lush vocal tones and rough guitar-work, ‘Maggie Says I Love You’ ideally captures that nexus between raw musicianship and sound-exploration. All of Ghost Blonde features that execution of melodic punk through soft lens, trimming the guitar of ‘Heedless’ to a blunt rumbling or affixing some echo to the swirling ‘Indigo Child’. None of their clever doctoring is unique in and of itself, perhaps, but No Joy somehow manage to imbed these slow-blooming layers without dulling their riffs. This debut’s thick production, instead of feeling murky, actually extends the daydream qualities of songs like ‘Pacific Pride’ or the title track, where a heavier hand would’ve lost the rhythmic backbone pushing things forward so swimmingly.

Mind you, the whole record would sound like a static wash over a pair of tinny computer speakers - and that’s fair warning for anyone expecting Ghost Blonde to deal in brash dynamics. What’s dramatic and enchanting and oh-so-replayable about No Joy’s scene is its introverted nature slowly revealed; those private triumphs best complimented while strolling through November by one’s lonesome, and defiantly lonesome. Sure, Ghost Blonde's crowning moments feel sustained by a woman’s touch but they're razor-sharp enough to simultaneously question what the hell that even means anymore.

No Joy - Hawaii by youandmeintheecho