August 31, 2020
motherhood
No joy
Joyful noise recordings

No Joy has always been, to varying degrees of subtlety, indebted to the 1990s. Jasamine White-Gluz is, after all, a child of that decade and a proud connoisseur of all things nu metal and alternative rock. 

Current culture is characterized by reboots and throwbacks. In fact, I just now scrolled past an Instagram ad for a chain wallet. But White-Gluz, who has a way of making everything she touches a little cooler than it has a right to be, has metabolized and distorted the music of her youth -- Korn, Deftones, No Doubt, Massive Attack --  turning it into something that is fully hers, rather than a mishmash of genre signifiers. Motherhood sounds, in a way, like 1994’s wildest record. And it’s pretty fresh in 2020, too.

Motherhood may trigger latent nostalgia for things that some of us have been trained to think of as deeply unhip (slap bass, for example). And while her work has always carried a palpable sense of “fuck it”, Motherhood -- which comes quite a long time after 2013’s full-length Wait to Pleasure -- feels like a big step in the direction of true artistic liberation. 

Hearing singles rolled out over the past few months I wondered how a track like “Dream Rats,” which features theatrical howling from Alissa White-Gluz (Jasamine’s sister and the frontwoman of mega-popular Sweadish melodic death metal band Arch Enemy) would fit in to the larger context of a record without becoming a jumble of oddities. And there is, indeed, a lot going on here. The soft-rock balladry of “Why Mothers Die” builds via chugging guitars, “Signal Lights” indulges in surgery high-school dance pop. The twisted, breathy, haze of “Primal Curse” gives way to the new-agy grandeur of “Fish,'' which brings to mind Kate Bush and Enya. All is infused with abiant heaviness. One fan on twitter described feeling drunk from the effects of the record. But despite the dizzying aspects, a clarily shines through like a beam of light so bright it makes you squint.

No Joy has always been weirder than the shoegaze categorization in which it’s inevitably filed. White-Gluz has a silly streak that can seem confusing on paper, but which ultimately shakes out into a cohesive final product. “As long as people are open minded about music they can hear different things,” she’s said. And Motherhood, with its layers and layers and layers, ends up sounding like no one but No Joy. 

Press materials draw a line between the record and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, a book that wrestles with the conflicts between procreation and artistic pursuit. “Time is critical,” White-Gluz explains in the release. “You have to make decisions that are extremely time sensitive and your body doesn’t care.” 

The record itself resists direct decoding, since lyrics are often buried in reverb. But the fierceness of White-Gluz’ need for artistic agency in a business that doesn’t much value women, especially as they age, comes through. (Full disclosure: as a fellow woman in her late 30s, I could be projecting). Ultimately, though, Motherhood doesn’t feel like a battle as much as an exploration. 

On “Four,” a baby’s cackle punctuates White-Gluz’s loopy, remixed request to “just keep calling me baby.” It’s a perfect glimpse of White-Gluz’s sense of humor, and intentionally or not, it reads as a wink to the record’s overarching themes. We’re reminded not to look at motherhood (or Motherhood)  from any one particular angle. Parents, children, lovers, friends, art: motherhood exists everywhere, in all kinds of ways.
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Motherhood was released on August 21. Purchase it here.

August 31, 2020
Partial Infinite Sequence
Samara Lubelski
Open Mouth

The center label of Samara Lubelski’s Partial Infinite Sequence features an image of a flower made from thick, scratchy-looking twine. It’s something you’d find on a grandmother’s coffee table, where you might sit and trace the endless petals with your finger, idly noticing the contrast between decorative function and rough reality. 

It’s an image that hints at Lubelski’s own artistic complexity, and the aesthetic and sensory contractions that aren’t really contradictions at all. The native New Yorker is prolific singer/songwriter, improviser, multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer with a long list of collaborators including Marcia Bassett and Thurston Moore. She was a member of neo-psych band MV & EE, and Tara Jane O’Neil’s The Sonora Pine, and experimental rock band Jackie-O Motherfucker (among others). 

She’s released several records of her own rich kaleidoscopic folk pop -- 2018’s sparkly Flickers at the Station being the most recent -- but her greatest powers are harnessed in improvisation. 

Where her last studio release on Open Mouth Records -- a self-titled violin/guitar collaboration with label owner Bill Nace -- kept to a low-key psychedelic slow-burn, Partial Infinite Sequence, which is just Lubelski and her violin, is a wildly dynamic, almost tactile experience. Sound unwinds like the twine flower, or a spider web, or (forgive this reference) Harold’s purple crayon, looping and squiggling, shifting shape and density. Sometimes it sounds like bird calls, or like a scream of laughter, fading in and out, coming into and out of focus. There are takeoffs and landings which circle in wobbly lines around the brain. Here and there the sound of the violin becomes recognizably violin-y, sketching rough little drawings, then vibrating into something else.

Whatever music she’s making, Lubelski knows how to use space and, while there’s a minimalism to this record, she pushes and pulls right at the edge of too much and not enough. Partial Infinite Sequence doesn’t bully even when it confronts. 

Trumpeter Nate Wooly compared the feel of this record to the moment when you trip on the sidewalk, the space that exists before you either fall or recover. It’s a helpful illustration: the moments of urgency land like direct messages from the nervous system. In that way, the listening experience is clarifying. There’s a sense of suspension, of time being bent just a little, offering a small window of the inner workings of everything.
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Partial Infinite Sequence was released on Open Mouth Records. A digital version will be available via Cafe Oto shortly. Purchase the rest of Samara’s discography here.