Hitch, A Wild Ride
or
Hitch, A Musical in 13 Parts

A review of The Joy Formidable’s Latest Album

By Peter Dysart

As a preface, this album was released six months ago and from the week of its release, I’ve been listening intently. As the band’s third full release, Hitch was immediately a bit of a rabbit hole that ran deeper and deeper on subsequent listens. The further I dug into it, the more it revealed to me, and the further I fell under its spell.

Since April, I’ve wanted to give this album a proper review. Admittedly, an interesting mix of reviews initially threw me off. Some feigned hurried praise; others were feebly attempting to even describe the music. One of the best reviews came from a young girl near London, who stirred the pot and got people talking. Even if you don’t agree with her point of view, that’s what reviews should do. We genuinely hope she writes many more reviews. In the meantime, many others were just simply plugging a review list, knowing they’d do the same for another hundred albums this year.

As for this, most of this was written in April, but I’ve waited for the initial buzz to die down. The band had taken three years to produce a third album, so what if I took a few months to review it? Good things do take time, but in all honesty, I was also waiting for the vinyl pressing to dive into.

Vinyl aside, I do most of my listening these days from a train to and from the city. The train is where I drink my tea or ale depending on the commute direction, and where I listen to free form playlists comprised of classical, retro, folk, and rock music depending on my mood. On occasion, I couple my writing with music and the ideas flow out. The night I carved out this review, I was listening to Leonard Slatkin conducting Copeland followed by Hitch.

Aaron Copeland was a master of the sonic hook. He composed breathtaking sonic landscapes that mocked real-life in their intensity and colour. There isn’t a thing he composed that isn’t etched in my memory. Best of all, he was a master storyteller who didn’t mind drifting off course and taking his time to complete a tale. This, in essence, is exactly what The Joy Formidable have become for me, and it’s no surprise that I find the parallels between these two artistic ventures.

From the first time I heard Billy the Kid, Copeland never needed to gain my attention. And likewise, from early in their career, this two-part Welsh, one-part Wolverhampton trio never had to work their way into my consciousness anymore than a chainsaw works to cut through wood. Copeland composed music for nearly everything from ballets to plays to film, and there’s no small stretch to imaging The Joy Formidable doing nearly the same.

From the beginning, this group mastered the three-minute rock hook, but it wasn’t long before the length of their compositions stretched to six or seven minutes, and they shifted their stories between kabuki poetry to cryptic prose. From there, they’ve never stopped shifting and drifting. But when they do stop long enough to produce a body of work, the results are highly focused and engrossing. If you can forgive a band for lack of time management and timely releases, their third album is brilliant. It leaps outs, grabs your attention and then unravels, revealing complex tales of everyday life, real or imagined.

Hitch is an album that rotates on its sonic axis by recurring thematic elements, compositionally and contextually as it weaves a powerfully deliberate mood across 13 songs – almost as a theatrical effort. Many of the stories are propelled by tragic heroes and heroines popping in and out of vignettes to tell us their stories, and plead their case before us. The ranges of emotions and experiences are as complex and gutting as they are colourful.

You could easily take this entire work as a West End musical if it weren’t for all the goddamned buzzing, bashing, clattering and thundering that emanate from this trio of artist. Hitch displays a sensuous compositional depth and a richness of orchestration. mixed in with what seems like endless hooks.

This musical leads off with a powerful statement in A Second in White, as the preamble for the album. I might be mistaken, and I often am, but it feels like it’s about unfulfilled expectations in life. Next, Radio of Lips gives us the state of affairs for this band on a new label. It’s powerful, driven, urgent, and intoxicating. Take your kings and say goodnight, I won’t fall asleep inside. BBC Wales’s announcer Adam Walton was quick to hone in on the meaning of this allure of this lyric, which remain wrapped in intrigue and enigma.

The Last Thing on My Mind is a perfect example of theatrical musical composition, featuring a perfect minor chord progression and hook that builds, expands and explodes in a big rock fashion. As this song plants an early commercial guitar hook, and the song trails off with that minor chord, it’s immediately mirrored by piano on the next track, Liana. Achieving continuity between tracks might not be something every listener catches, but subconsciously, it’s there and it’s pure gold. And it’s not just recurring themes and hooks but the deliberate effort of arranging these songs in one particular order that makes this the stuff of great musicals and rock theatre. It’s in that moment you realise this just isn’t a rock band anymore.

Liana is a killer track and the album’s second strongest song. Complete with a one of Ritzy’s core characters – the lost femme Liana who waits for a man who will never return. Or worse, Liana is empathetic to an abuser. Ritz weaves her dangerous lyric, ‘Liana won’t change, whatever it takes, she’ll wait for you.’ The lyric binds us tighter with every passing verse as it build up.

‘We’ll meet in that spot, on the curve, on the curve
We’ll meet in our place, on the curve, on the curve
Up there, on the curve, on the curve up there…’

Then, there’s a brief moment of quiet before Rhydian delivers a thunderously fuzzed up bass hook that will likely chip a few diamond styli in coming years. I confess I’ve sat with my fingers on the volume knob just waiting to turn it up on this section.

In recent years, the band have made a significant shift to be more guitar oriented. That much was made plain with their brilliant Aruthrol singles releases, in which Ritz and especially Rhydian demonstrated their stringed instrument gifts with great intensity. It’s a shift that I reckon they wanted since they signed their first contract, and with their new deal on Caroline Records, guitars and vocals rule the iron throne.

Alright, fine. Matt’s dragons will lay waste to everything eventually.

Back to the music. With the end of Liana, there’s fast and simple scene change on stage, and The Brook continues a grand plateau of songs that will last anther six tracks. The Brook, a sweeping and cinematic ballad, features the introspective and haunting lament of ‘Maybe the brook won’t save me…’, which incessantly pulls us down below the surface as Rhydian’s lead guitar soars overhead. ‘I’m in love with what could have been.’ The chapters of this musical continue to unfold around us as Ritz’s vocal delivery skips atop the strumming guitar and soaring on the chorus. I get chills listening to this. Ritz bends the optics or reality as her lyrics intimately collect and gather us into this relationship. Fans of the band’s old work will immediately identify with the majesty of this composition. I’m torn between this track and what will occur in two tracks time.

It’s Started begins with a tight and hyper marching cadence, aggressively pounding out on the snare and toms before lighting itself on fire to dance around us. Drummers are usually given fuckall credit for their work, but Matt Thomas, who happily brings the heart stopping beats into the centre of this fanfare, spares us no room to breathe between his metered snaps, rumbling toms and cymbal crashes.

The Gift leads off like something straight out of Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack, and Rhydian’s only vocal track is also perhaps the most haunting and brilliant song of the album. Rhydian exhales the final ‘We won’t get this gift again’. The finality of that statement is punctuated with a crushingly mournful lament from which there is no return. The finality of its wailing isn’t a matter of tapping some soulful blues tone – it is the sum of our most crushing and darkest tears captured in a black pool.

The album could have easily ended there. But that’s precisely where Running Hands With the Night suddenly grabs us on a lonely late night terror ride, twisting with sadness, regret and fate and unrelenting in its sonic attack. Ritz dispassionately and manically narrates much of the experience, almost disassociated from it all – luring us along…no, strapping us in for the ride.

Matt’s marching cadence returns on this track and relentlessly propels us ever deeper into the depths of despair whilst fuzzed guitars and bass troop along in step. The piano adds a nice E-Street colour near the end. Close your eyes and there’s a distinct smell of scorched engine oil and rubber tyres on cold wet asphalt. Only at the end, when you’re exhausted does it finally release you, and the realisation strikes coldly – it’s just a song.

Fog (Black Windows) continues the ride with tale that’s haunted by the living, haunted by choices, and one that contains the album’s finest lyric:

‘Any trace of a smile murders going back,
But it’s just a rub, these sheets are haunted,
Not by you, but a moment that’s long gone,
I see it better when you’re not here’

It’s a deceptively soft and straightforward song that illustrates the power of a great vocal atop a simple and nearly unadorned composition. In truth, the lack of overpowering instrumentation allows us to focus on the hypnotic lyrics.

Underneath the Petal drives Ritz’s powerful vocals up front yet again, and her lyrics leave us utterly destroyed. If the song offers any sort of solace or release from sorrow, that can be found only in Rhydian’s exquisite and earthy plucked guitar passages followed by echoing piano in parallel, and the whispers of a desert wind through the flute of Laura J Martin.

Blowing Fire jolts us back up again, just in time for the curtains to fall on this performance with Don’t Let Me Know.

I confess myself to be upended by this record. If it weren’t for the fire and swagger of Passerby, the extra track at the end of the album, Hitch might have left me in a semi-permanent funk reserved for a Glaswegian band the likes of a The Twilight Sad.

Better my last memory of this album be that trademark snarl and snap of Ms Ritz. And better for our story’s protagonist to go down fighting than to have ever loved before. The solo roils and crackles to life like Jimmy Hendrix digging down on his knees to coax a bit of feedback from an amp, and then Ritz launches into her buzz saw electric flamenco style.

This release is graced with the art of Ralph Steadman, who lends the band a bit of fear and loathing on the cover. It also reflects a certain defiant mood on the album. And as Ritz describes their meeting, it was a dinner full of alcohol and a ‘yes, I’ll create some art for you’. But in truth, Steadman was already part of this musical in its conception and it its over-arching theme: Better to make an endless joyful noise than to lay down and die in a Utah desert with one’s bones picked clean to a sun bleached white by an unforgiving sun only to be wind kissed into the dusts of oblivion. That is The Joy Formidable and this is Hitch.

 

Tour note

The Joy Formidable are currently on a North American tour with South Africa’s Kongos. If you’re a Kongos’s fan just discovering this band for the first time, Hitch might be a perfect entry for you into another great band. It is splendid rock threatre. If you go to the show, pick up a copy of this new CD. You might not put it down for some time. For the rest of you, you know the drill. Rail up. Cheers.

Upcoming shows
1 October
Saskatoon, Canada
Loui’s

2 October
Winnipeg, Canada
Garrick Centre

4 October
Minneapolis, MN, USA
Varsity Theater

5 October
Chicago, IL, USA
The Vic Theater

6 October
Detroit, MI, USA
St. Andrews Hall

8 October
Montreal, Canada
Metropolis

9 October
Toronto, Canada
Danforth Music Hall

11 October
Rochester, NY, USA
Main Street Armory

12 October
Boston, MA, USA
The Royale

14 October
Silver Spring, MD, USA
The Fillmore

15 October
New York, NY, USA
PlayStation Theater

16 October
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Electric Factory

18 October
Asheville, NC, USA
Orange Peel

20 October
New Orleans, LA, USA
House of Blues

21 October
Houston, TX, USA
Warehouse Live

22 October
Austin, TX, USA
Emos

23 October
Dallas, TX, USA
Gas Monkey Live!

24 October
Albuquerque, NM, USA
El Rey Theater

25 October
Las Vegas, NV, USA
Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas

26 October
San Diego, CA, USA
Music Box

27 October
San Francisco, CA, USA
Regency Ballroom

28 October
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The Wiltern

29 October
Phoenix, AZ, USA
The Crescent