My Review: JOY/DISASTER - HYPNAGOGY

 

JOY/DISASTER - HYPNAGOGY

My God: how beautiful, how rich...

The wind of shortcomings and approximations is blown away by a cylindrical rose containing eleven emotional explosions that tangle the stomach and sublimate the senses, in a rush where everything is left behind, with the future about to bless this fluorescence full of claws and delicious punches in the face. It all happens thanks to a line-up that has been sowing prowess for some time now, and with their latest work HYPNAGOGIA achieves artistic perfection, without smearing, offering an artistic sampler of enormous dimensions, both in terms of content and form, because in both situations their range is solid and banishes all doubt and uncertainty in those who might be sceptical. Instead, the freshness, the power of the structure, the branches, the liveliness with which black and grey approach the sun of life make one's mouth open wide: there are prodigies that must be supported and this is what must be done. It is eighteenth birthday of the band from Nancy (France), and it must be said that with their coming of age these men, who kiss life with nettles, brambles and blue roses in their mouths, have conquered an enveloping, disorienting maturity, through a churning sea of arrows, with sounds that tell even before the riffs and the succession of chords and melodic textures.
Ever since the rocky debut, back in 2006, with JD, the Old Scribe has seen expressed the talents of a multifaceted, edgy ensemble, capable of slinging itself into the terrain of research in order to govern the throbbing needs that had to emerge. With the subsequent Paranoia everything was clear: the magnet had been deposited forever in our hearts. And then a crescendo with no possibility of stopping.... But let us come to this last gasp, the new work, which will forever remain in the pool of every desire.
What is impressive is the band's deep participation in human delirium without the risk of soiling the soul: the feat is to enter reality and not observe it from afar, making it all believable, for a sensual play of moods, smells, and descriptions of the human psyche that astounds. Inclined to the Post-Punk temperament from the outset, they wear the fluid guise of a Guitar Rock that envelops the rhythm section to enhance, through continuous interlocking, their intuition and desire to complete what a single musical genre does not allow. Here, then, is music that scratches, absorbs, claims listeners through enchanting phrasing, moody vicissitudes, sowing intense manic debris, deconstructing the conviction that everything has already been said. Robust is the opposition on their part, and it is an action accomplished through rhythmic and melodic pounding, which swallows up any reluctance and develops the ocean of reflections that knead to tears. The determination to find a style and erudite our ignorance is a sanguine satellite, devoid of poisons but dense, like a tongue of asphalt. To do this, every single track favours the perfect embrace between thorny melodies and rhythms that show a concrete ability to distance themselves from those who feed comparisons and reminiscences. They discard, with great pride, this risk and trace the musical sky with trajectories full of novelty, without denying a historical framework that has suggested but not determined the mode of expression.
The greatest creator of all this goodness is Nicolas ROHR, an illuminist of pulsional gravity, the French magician who engraves on the staff with a treble clef placed over his heart. And, when the syllables come out of his throat, he rushes into the heart of every nervous tension... Sebastien MASSUL is the pilot of rhythm, with phosphorescent sticks and powerful arms, but melodic when necessary, to give the drums a poetic and robust role. Simon BONNAFOUS is the band's second guitarist, an angel with a cloak full of drops of blood who delivers gentle punches. Soupa RUNDSTADLER is a four-string magnet, capable of making the earth a continuous earthquake, and his blows are lashings that make the skin a continuous shiver. Like an operating theatre in which the surgery consists of extirpating cancer, so the four French artificers pounce on the lifeless body of life to remove tons of dirt: they intervene with a firm, decisive hand, scraping away all the impurities, to restore dignity and relief. These songs are therapeutic, rummaging through human history and projecting their talents into our veins. The singing, in English, is confident, the lyrics well written and the vocal mode is a mirror, precise, of how thoughts and feelings can establish a perfect union.
Everything is supportive, convinced, like a dark marriage that penetrates into the bowels of behaviour: the lyrics are swaggering, direct, they focus on the human experience where fear is not allowed but touches it, succeeding in the feat of coming out on top. Human relationships are full of descriptions in which dreams and promises are a carpet of troubles that they tend to compact towards a liquid dissolution, bringing the truth of all mediocrity before a mirror that sweats and trembles. The energy they produce is a divine gift, which shakes you up but at the same time directs you to make better use of your time, because they have succeeded in teaching a lesson to thousands of bands fossilised on a few, dull, bilious schemes, refreshing all music: don't disperse this mighty miracle. Now it's time to navigate through this seaweed infected with irresistible beauty...


Song by Song

1 - Celebrate

Celebrate, of course we do, the song that opens the album: on an initially slow and melancholic start, the four then manage to stir the spirits and launch, progressively (thanks to a bloody bass), the whole thing into a hypnotic riff and melodic but baritone singing. The lyrics are a functional invective against an interlocutor wasting his kingdom, in the time of change that stifles every dream. The solo is exploding rust and the drumming a shotgun blast...

2 - Fear

A poignant display of a decaying relationship, everything is orchestrated to be a tribal mantra, with a willingness to give indie rock a chance to flirt with post-punk. Tears gathered in the shadows celebrate the courage of a song that exerts a continuous fascination, with the energetic duality of guitars that swaggeringly render these emotions like an eel escaping death...

3 - Nowhere

The ballad that kills the truth: when all that is revealed sinks the enthusiasm. Dramatic lyrics find the right sonic backdrop for a combo that grates all vagueness, until the lead guitar plunges over the ocean of pain. Compact, it exhibits a theatricality reminiscent of the moods of early post-punk, with an eye-breaking trail of death: let there be precious tears...

4 - Sorrow

Can one describe failure without projecting it into the mire of slowness? Joy/Disaster succeed, with a harrowing arpeggio, a rhythm that slaps the senses and a refrain that is a crown of thorns. Decadent, electrifying, melodic, it strips away all whimsy in a gothic-sounding pulse, where, however, the bass and drums bring us back to a rock that pulses with life. The song that reveals the breadth of their abilities.

5 - Whispering to the wall

Human frailty and meanness are nailed by these initial notes played by a piano full of pain, then the song gives the stage to the singing for a bitter but truthful account. Dark, gloomy, metallic (in that it has all the semblance of an uppercut thrown at our desires), the composition offers the best side of that long line of bands that tried to bring darkwave and post-punk back into the plane of necessity in the 1990s. Here, the four do much better: they oxygenate the present with their melancholy and wisdom. Another nail in the head...

6 - In the end

With the same class as Madrugada, the French combo writes a treatise on wisdom, with the experience of having to compare the real to the dream, to write a different ending. Slow, capable of being obsessive with guitars that are almost hidden but then sublimely accompany Nicolas in a refrain that is an electric shock full of needles and thorns...

7 - Changes

Time, which stagnates and does not change, is surrounded by words and musical notes that make it clear how the band is inclined to keep its foot on the accelerator, but with its eyes open. An up and down, where the rhythm changes, rummaging between our legs, to launch us into a disjointed dance, like puppets stunned by so much evolving force...

8 - Wiping tears

Demons and desires live in the same garden: the four of them raise the tempo, fill the cannons and launch a bomb, fearlessly, to overtake mediocrity and write a new, bombastic treatise of sweat and truth. The drumming and bass are fiery gunslingers eager to make a killing, the guitars are actors with a wonderful, glowing script and the singing the icing on the infectious cake...

9 - Promise

Take Franz Ferdinand and make them hermetic and dragging in a dance full of spectres: a theatre that approaches cabaret, with the rhythm favouring the plunge into the void. Simply enchanting, with a gothic corollary glimpse, for a listen that makes our legs turn into golden wings

10 - Secrets

My God: so much beauty, so much richness... Everything depends on decisions and Joy/Disaster extend the discourse in a vitaminic, robust, lysergic, atomic, scorching path, where at the end of the listening everything burns inside... There is no negativity, but the bitterness of existence that swells the notes and makes our eyes rivers of tears in a gaseous state...


11 - Into a dream

The dreamlike aspect has almost always found adherence in ballads, in gentle flows surrounding poetry. In the last track of this jewel-filled album, however, we witness a display of robust skill in transforming the subject into an enchanting electric arpeggio. The whole is supported by a melody capable of shoving in our faces a series of words that, like the notes present, compact the need for a farewell conscious of a new hallucinating addiction: like the other ten, this song also seizes and unloads its adrenalin in our inebriated listening...

Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford, England
23 November 2023

https://joy-disaster.bandcamp.com/album/hypnagogia