“Let’s put apples in the lemon pie!” exclaims Jad Fair on “The Time Is Now”, one of the least-hinged songs on Half Japanese’s Overjoyed. It’s the legendary art-punk band’s first new studio album since 2001’s Hello, and in those intervening 13 years, he hasn't lost his knack for the charm offensive. “The Time Is Now” wobbles and wanders like a tranquilized tiger cub, with a meandering jangle threatening to tug Jad’s string of greeting-card pleasantries alarmingly off center. “I’m so glad you’re you,” he sings through his nose, sounding more like the punk-rock Mister Rogers than Jonathan Richman ever did.
Richman is one of the few antecedents that went into Half Japanese’s protean stew of primitivist punk when the band formed in the '70s; avowedly amateurish and autodidactic, Jad and his brother David spun the blistering, shambolic rawness of their early singles into tooth-fracturing sweetness of their first masterpiece, 1980’s Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts (which featured, not so coincidentally, a Modern Lovers cover). Half Japanese is more infamous for the bands they’ve influenced, most notably Nirvana, although there’s a whole universe of lo-fi disciples tucked away in Jad’s back pocket. Overjoyed shows just how much Half Japanese, despite their reserved seat in the indie continuum, still exist in a hermetic dimension of its own. From the spiky, Voidoids-like jerkiness of “In Its Pull” to the slashing, sidelong surf riffs of “Shining Star”, the album views the rest of the musical world through a kaleidoscope and hears it through a tin can.
That said, Overjoyed isn’t anywhere near as tinny as Half Japanese is known for. Produced by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, it’s one of the most full-blooded and competently tracked albums in the band’s catalog. Even when “Meant to Be That Way” lurches off its axis thanks to an onslaught of wiggly, reverberating overdubs, the rhythm section is rock solid; barely a trace of lo-fi glory can be heard on “Do It Nation”, the album’s most distorted and self-destructive track. “Do it, do it, do it,” Jad chants like a bratty version of Malcolm Mooney over a droning, drool-inducing monochord. With maturity comes assuredness, but there’s a lack of desperate vulnerability to Overjoyed that renders it far less fetchingly fragile than its predecessors.
There’s a scene in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 1993 documentary Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King in which the band is performing on a makeshift stage for the residents of Duplex Nursing Home in Boston (made famous by David Greenberger’s long-running zine Duplex Planet). While hatcheting their way through a version of Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour”, one of the old men in the audience pulls a harmonica out of his shirt pocket and starts honking along, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. Not to paint them as ancient or anything, but the brothers Fair are now closer in age to that old man than they are to the strapping young versions of themselves who forged milestones like Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts. In essence, Overjoyed is the sound of the Fairs playing along with themselves, or at least the sweet, weird boys they used to be—not always with as much spark or chaos, but mashing up the fruits just as gleefully.
