No Joy quietly slipped their 2010 debut, Ghost Blonde, into the marketplace in late November of that year-- i.e., a commercial dead zone for releases that aren't celebrity Christmas records or quickie cash-in greatest-hits compilations. But, in retrospect, the timing was brilliant. Though unknown outside of Montreal, the fledgiing band had already made an enthusiastic fan out of indie rock's most voracious Tweeter, Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, whose band was just then starting to pop up on year-end best-of lists for their own 2010 debut. By January 2011, Best Coast had parlayed their critical buzz into theatre-headliner status, accruing enough clout to bring their Montreal mates on tour as their hand-picked opener, and introducing them to large Stateside audiences mere weeks after their album's release.
The instant mutual-admiration society made total sense: in their infancy, both Best Coast and No Joy exhibited a fondness for swooning melodies, and an equal affinity for obliterating them in a hurriance of fuzz and reverb. But since their 2011 tour, the bands have followed markedly divergent paths: while Best Coast followed Crazy for You by hiring Jon Brion to turn them into the world's youngest dad-rock band, No Joy have answered their own debut's promise by receding even deeper into the murk. If Ghost Blonde owed a considerable debt to the pedal-stomping squall of late-80s My Bloody Valentine, Negaverse sees them adopting MBV's release strategies as well, in the form of a five-song EP that feels less like a random collection of leftovers than a stand-alone mini-album of complementary tracks.
Negaverse marks an evolution from Ghost Blonde, though not in ways you'd necessarily expect. In concert, that album's hazy-headed distort-pop was given a muscular makeover worthy of SST-era Dinosaur Jr. Negaverse, however, deemphasizes the band's live presence by highlighting both the intimacy and intricacy of their songcraft; this is a record that feels demo-quality crude yet sonically dense and deliberate at the same time.
Opener "Junior" provides a logical leap-off from Ghost Blonde, its airy melody and wordless harmonies hitched to a double-time drum stomp that, thanks to the unyielding corrosiveness of Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd's guitars, still feels like it's moving in slow motion. But even when working within Negaverse's downsized dimensions, No Joy seem eager to reveal that there's more to their music than a simple noise/pop dichotomy: "Shame Cave" is another trash-can-thwacking Mary Chained rave-up, but one where the drums drop out in its final minute, transforming the song's reverberating guitar line and backing harmonies into a slow-dissolving swirl; "Smiley Face" takes a good half of its 3:35 runtime pulling back the slingshot before unleashing a space-bound robo-cow-punk rampage. And if Negaverse's proudly washed-out sound still provides little clue as to what White-Gluz is going on about, the enchantingly whispered "Yang Sanpanku" still manages to sculpt a dramatic arc out of what at first seems like a monolithic, buzz-killing drone; it's a song that sounds anthemic even if it lacks the basic lyrical intelligibility required of a proper anthem. Packing five songs into 15 minutes, Negaverse goes by in a blur-- but what impresses most is its sense of patience.
