The Joy Formidable, September 14 at the El Rey

The Joy Formidable came up the way a good band is supposed to and the way that seems so rare anymore: put out a collection of great songs and tour the hell out of it.  A lot of bands don’t have the great songs but these guys, with touring or without, got the word out early, with the A Balloon Called Moaning EP, and quickly they were moving up festival bills, then when the full album, The Big Roar, came out it seemed like everyone (within a certain circle of music fans) knew them.  It’s very forward music, not necessarily aggressive, just heavy, sometimes sludgy tunes that are balanced by a pixie-ish singer who can float her voice above all the heaviness.  You could guess that the heaviness comes from the production on disc but they bring it live too, even with just a three-piece band.  How that chick can play guitar like that and sing like that at the same time is beyond me.  She could be a force before too long, though hopefully it will be with the rest of the band.  It would be great if they could break onto radio but this is yet another of those bands that wasn’t designed for pop consumption, instead just doing music for those who can appreciate a breath of fresh air, as those who were at the El Rey that night were.  The venue was a good fit for the band, since they couldn’t quite make it to the Wiltern at that point in their career.  But they had stayed out on the road, getting their name and music out, at that point already out for at least a few years and still on for another half of that.  Being road warriors is one way to earn some success as a rock band, as it’s always been, but a band being up for anything anywhere is best served by having some great music and a fantastic persona as a group, and they have all of the above.  They even seemed to have traded confidence for exhaustion, remarkable for being out on the road for as long as they had been.  The measure of success for a band isn’t what it used to be, and it’s hard to see that a band has really broken through if they’ve only made it to the El Rey, but the Joy Formidable are a young band with hopefully a long road ahead of them, in a lengthy career of touring and putting out more fresh, heavy rock music.

I know and like Telekinesis, the openers, but I don’t know how they are live so I don’t know if Carla and I made the right decision in skipping them and eating at the Tex-mex place across the street.  But we needed to eat and the place is pretty good (though more being about the only place around the El Rey to get dinner before a show).

The Joy Formidable’s set-list:
"A Heavy Abacus"
"Greyhounds in the Slips"
"Austere"
"The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade"
"Cradle"
"Buoy"
"Whirring"

"The Magnifying Glass"
"I Don't Want To See You Like This"
(I don’t recall it being that short a show but I don’t remember if they played more than that.)