Junior Boys – Begone Dull Care Review
So this is the third Junior Boys album. The first of the bunch, Last Exit, was one of my favourites of 2004, and almost single-handedly inspired my friend and I to start a band. I remember Jeremy Greenspan from one of my English classes at McMaster. At the time he wore enormous pants that resembled a wide skirt. He dropped the course by the fourth week. While the rest of us struggled through Foucault, Derrida, and Roland Barthes, he went on to make a hit record.
I must say before all else that I love the title of this album; lifted from a 1949 Norman McClaren animated short Junior Boys are really sinking their intertextual teeth into a beautiful fragment of Canadiana here. Not that I harbour any fond nationalist sentiments about our country, but McClaren is an undeniable genius and the quotation does not and cannot escape us. Second, this band is always floating around my iPod, and since I respect the pair very much, I will be critical of this album.
I think it is always a bad choice to situate two six-and-a-half minute tracks at the beginning of a record unless they are undeniably brilliant, and unfortunately the first two songs of Begone Dull Care are not. “Parallel Lines” and “Work” are long numbers that build very slowly to allow Jeremy Greenspan’s voice to swoop and sway, to generate expressive strength. Personally, I find this exercise interesting, but if you don’t already love what the Junior Boys do, I can understand if you get bored and skip onward. Frankly, for me, the album doesn’t really get going until the third song, with “Bits and Pieces,” where finally, the listener is rewarded for being patient through the first nearly fifteen minutes. Over the next few tracks, it really revs up. “Hazel,” the following number, is an excellent song, arguably the best on the album, and the first of the series to feature a chorus anyone with an ear can sing along to even on first listen. It made me dance alone in my room as if I was drunk on a litre of sangria (which I was, but nevertheless.) It reminds the listener Junior Boys are pop musicians, after all, no matter how hard they try at times (or how hard the critics try) to position themselves as experimental minimal electronic artists.
There is an opiating quality to the record that is autochthonous to the pair’s sound. I have friends who dismiss them as “snoozy” but I will defend the boys by arguing they always program sufficient layers of counter-rhythms and melodies in their music to keep us interested. This record is relatively coherent and offers several hit-single type of songs we all covet while also keeping to that other of their traditions: to push the boundaries of their peculiar melancholic variety of electronic pop. In the end I like this album, and maybe after a dozen listens I will come to adore it as much as So This Is Goodbye, but probably not as much as the first record. At first impact Begone Dull Care resonates at a level of 7.9 out of 10.
Junior Boys – Hazel
Junior Boys – The Animator
Tags: album
I don’t too much care for any of the songs I’ve heard thus far, The Animator is the most moving to me while the other 4 or 5 tracks fall flat. I will ALWAYS love the Junior Boys, but they definitely get the gas face from me for only playing Coachella while in the LA area.
FUCK COACHELLA!