“We’ve never had an audience that gets any validation of its coolness through liking us,” Tim Kinsella writes of Joan of Arc. That’s putting it delicately. For a good stretch of their two decade run, Joan of Arc were the most hated act in emo, unpopular with listeners, critics, and at times seemingly their own record label. Revisiting reviews of their old albums is a crash course in just how vicious music criticism could be around the turn of the century. The group attracted that special kind of vitriol reserved not for bands that piss people off but for those that seem to be trying to piss people off; especially for fans of Kinsella’s previous band Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc’s low-passion art-rock seemed like a personal insult. Few of Kinsella’s peers seemed to relish destroying the trust they’d cultivated with their fans quite so much.
At some point—probably around 2000’s The Gap, certainly by 2003’s In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust—Kinsella began to own the fact that the average listener despised this group. With its unsteady lineup and blurry genre focus, the group had never really operated with clear parameters anyway, so Joan of Arc became the default outlet for Kinsella’s most contentious ideas. On paper, there’s a certain logic to that: When people have no expectations for your band, you’re free to do just about anything, and to go to uncomfortable places a band with a reputation to preserve might steer clear of. That’s on paper, though. In practice, Joan of Arc never had all that much great music to show for their scorched-earth approach.
Kinsella has downplayed some of his more disagreeable instincts on his recent records, most prominently on the crowd-pleasing sophomore album from his Owls project. But he also made a broader appeal on Joan of Arc’s 2011 offering Life Like, a satisfyingly straightforward rock record a lot more listeners might have given a chance if it hadn’t come out under the Joan of Arc moniker. Lest anybody get the impression that Kinsella has begun to seek approval with age, though, Joan of Arc’s latest troll manifesto He’s Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands offers a nasty reminder of Kinsella’s ability to ruffle feathers by playing up one of his most off-putting qualities: his humor. It plays like Kinsella’s belated answer to the smirking whimsy-pop of the Unicorns, but without the inclusive spirit, and it may be the most overtly irritating thing he’s ever done. He’s Got the Whole is an album designed to test the limits of your nerves from its sing-songy very first line: “What the faaaaaahhhhh-uuuuuuuck?”
And so the silliness commences. “Pizza and cunnilingus both give me heartburn,” Kinsella snickers over some seasick electro-clash on “This Must Be the Placenta.” Elsewhere he pledges to “kill the little Hitler in my heart” on “Stranged That Egg Yolk” and milks a jingle-like chorus out of the rhyme “I know how the nicest guy in ISIS feels” on “New Wave Hippies,” before unloading any surplus zingers in an MC Paul Barman-esque word spray on “Ta-Ta Terrordome.” Throughout it all, he’s accompanied in tunelessness by singing guitarist Melina Ausikaitis, who cheers him on with off-kilter injections and takes a couple of eccentric lead turns on “Two-Toothed Troll” and “Never Wintersbone You,” the latter of which begins with some beat poetry about Phil Collins.
Ausikaitis brings a weird energy to the record, and, really, just the mere presence of any energy at all is enough to distinguish it from most Joan of Arc albums. But lack of energy has never been Joan of Arc’s biggest fault. You can write off the band’s aimless drone or meek art-rock experiments of the past as an acquired taste. The more glaring problem has always been Kinsella himself, and the satisfaction he seems to take from refusing to let the listener in on his jokes. He’s Got the Whole is presented as good fun, but it’s only fun in a one-sided, “why are you hitting yourself?” sort of way. It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.
