Live Review: Joyce Manor & Algernon Cadwallader, The Black Cat (8/19/12)

Punk rock is a genre of many feelings. It's one of intensity and forcefulness, of progress and change, and of sadness and despair. The combination of these traits fuels the energy behind the music and the emotions created by it. Joyce Manor's coheadliner with Algernon Cadwallader may very well be proof of this, as every second of the show was powered by all of these feelings, creating an atmosphere that wasn't simply just about the music, but the personal lives of the bands and crowd as well.

Album Review: Joyce Manor - Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired

Album Rating: B-

Joyce Manor really found themselves a sound with Constant Headache and their 2011 self-titled.  Both records bled with the raw embitterment of their local Southern California punk scene yet somehow grasped onto an impossible level of catchiness, affording them multiple U.S. tours and leaving a slew of hoarse-throated basement punks in their wake.  Frontman Barry Johnson summed it up pretty effectively when questioned about his tendency for sub-two minute power-tracks in an interview: "You're taking the time to listen to my band … so I'm not going to have the audacity to bore the shit out of you."  It was exactly on this compendiousness that a band like Joyce Manor is founded, this same urgency and succinct song structure being the crux of a record like Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired.  All of this said, 2012 Joyce Manor is a band coasting not only on brevity, but also on tradeoffs.

You know, if the Mayans are right, this is my last year-ending list, ever.

The original draft for this end-of-the-year synopsis saw a somewhat dissatisfied me attempting to relate the lack of late-December snow on the ground here in the Northeast to the seemingly incomplete feel of 2011 and its musical offerings. For this writer, 2011 ushered in quite a few much-anticipated releases that ended up falling far short of their predecessors (Battles, Lemuria, and Manchester Orchestra, to name just a few). It paid witness to the disbandments of Philadelphia's Snowing and Frank Turner's departure from Gallows, two longtime favorite bands of your ever-humble narrator. In writing this, I very nearly fell into an abyss of textual lamentation, centered around the simple fact that my 2011 top-ten list is but a sad skidmark in the wake of its beefy 2010 counterpart. But really, what good is it to whine and moan about what this year and music could have been? 2012 is already shaping up to be more promising, with scheduled releases from Every Time I Die, Joyce Manor, and Andrew Bird all dotting the early year forecast, not to mention my 21st birthday and yet another installment of summer Olympics (read: publicized females gymnastics) both looming on the horizon. And so, temporarily dropping the resentfulness of the year's more underwhelming moments, I present you with a handful of moments during which 2011 showed no signs of suck: Eric's Top Twelve Tracks of Twenty-Eleven.