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Artist: Joy Electric
Label: Tooth and Nail Records
Length: 10 tracks
A year and a half after the release of Joy Electric’s then most left-field and cryptic work to date, The Otherly Opus arrives as a clear progressive development of the warmer, fuller sounds of the menacing The Ministry of Archers. While resembling the song writing of its forerunner, Ronnie Martin has chosen to steer things in a fresh direction musically for his new release - TOO is a “vocals” album, melodically rich and deeply layered, the synths reigned-in and controlled like never before, producing a sound that feels nearly symphonic in nature and approaches an epic whimsical scope similar to the fan and critical favorite The White Songbook, marking TOO as one of Joy Electric’s most outstanding and distinctive albums yet.
As Ronnie himself inclines,
Joy Electric has always remained in a relatively similar style throughout
the decade and a half of the band’s career. A clear refinement in
song writing can be sensed through each new album progressively, and in
many ways, The Otherly Opus carries on this refinement. The
new songs are all fantastically catchy and memorable, familiar to past
Joy Electric staples of nostalgic ballads, fantastical pop-punk, and danceable
bubbly pop. But while this feels whole and through like a new Joy
Electric recording, TOO feels musically unlike anything that the
band has put out before.
A thick chorus of vocals
dominate every song, both enriching lead melodies and dynamically stressing
them with counter-melodies and starker underlying tones. The synths
are still certainly there, but they now play a lesser – though not less
important than – role in the music alongside the spectacular vocals.
It’s an orchestra of sound that Ronnie has crafted, sheds the structured
and mechanical nature of most of the rest of the Legacy series, while still
remaining in the construct of Joy Electric’s signature quirky pop.
The duality of TOO’s
themes is apparent – the first half is classic Joy Electric, the latter
a collection of songs dealing with Biblical antediluvian accounts - but
not so much that the album in its entirety feels out of balance.
There are elements of mythical whimsy in the first half (the title-track)
and melancholic nostalgia in the second (“Ponderance Need Not Know”), and
most of the lyrics throughout remain uniformly cryptic. With a couple
moments of extreme lyrical repetition, it is combined the most potentially
difficult element of the new album, and may take some patience to get used
to.
Though that initial period
of patience and training on the part of the listener exists, this is still
an amazing recording, possibly the most melodically rich and unique collection
of pop songs ever released by Joy Electric, nullifies many of the criticisms
laid against the band in the past– weak vocals, a lack of progressive style
– and asserts unquestionably that Joy Electric is one of the most worthwhile
bands in the Christian industry. It’s the result of a hard-working
and unfortunately oft disregarded artist staying true to his love for his
craft, and the result is something brilliant. It may not appeal to
many, but TOO deserves my highest recommendation possible and could
end up being one of the best pop records of the year.
Jonathan Avants 3/31/07
