No Joy, Wait To Pleasure

Right from the first menacing squall of feedback on opening track “E,” No Joy makes it clear that they don’t give a good goddamn about that whole “nu-gaze” tag. The Canadian trio (Jasamine White-Gluz, Laura Lloyd, and Garland Hastings) isn’t here to praise the legacy of My Bloody Valentine, but to bury it…then dig the members of that band up, light them up on fire, smoke the ashes, and bury what’s left.

Okay, sure, so there is a heavy element of old-school shoegaze to Wait To Pleasure, but it’s shoegaze with muscle, shoegaze that will fuck you up if you look at it sideways. It’s far closer kin to the insomniac rumble of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or the drug-addled noise-mess of XTRMNTR-era Primal Scream than it is Loveless or Souvlaki or On Fire.

Even tracks like “Hare Tarot Lies” or “Slug Night,” which are among the lightest tracks on the album, have these awesomely solid-sounding guitars that come in partway through, and when they do, they practically shove your head to the floor.

There’s also a serious resemblance The Raveonettes, particularly on songs like “Prodigy,” with its driving, danceable beats, or “Ignored Pets,” with its massive wall of sludgy-sweet guitars; on the former, the drumbeats make the song, revving it up from sleepy noise-rock into a stuttering, dancefloor-crazed rocker. As fits with the band’s noisy aesthetic, there’s a lot that reminds me of Sonic Youth, too, especially the messy, turbulent “Lizard Kids.”

Best of all, the band manages to combine all those influences damn near seamlessly, sucking in all the aforementioned bands and sounds, plus The Jesus & Mary Chain and M.I.A. and — hey, why the hell not? — Phil Spector girl groups (if said girl groups were stoned out of their heads, like they sound on “Wrack Attack”), and making them into something unmistakably their own. It may be easy to play spot-the-influence, but it’s far easier to just forget it all, sit back, and let it ride.

(Feature photo by Saad Al-Hakkak.)