Perhaps it was inevitable that shoegaze would lose some of its capacity to awe over time. The genre’s disorienting squalls and nurturing fuzz create the impression of pulling beauty from murk, defying the sense that none of these noises should sound as alluring as they somehow do. It’s a powerful trick, or at least it used to be. But decades of repetition have proven there’s an almost innate property that makes the genre’s distorted guitars and vaporous synths work together so pleasurably, so even the most artful contemporary shoegaze rarely feels as daring as the genre’s heyday works. It’s akin to watching yet another magician submerge themselves in a water tank. Whatever appearance of risk the exercise once held is gone.
All that speaks to how No Joy emerged as one of the most distinguished shoegaze acts of the last decade: They’re one of the few that dares to upend the genre’s fundamental alchemy. The Montreal band, once a quartet but now essentially a solo project for principal member Jasamine White-Gluz, has grown bolder about challenging genre conventions since their 2010 debut, most recently deemphasizing the guitar and dabbling in electronica on 2018’s No Joy / Sonic Boom, a collaboration with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember. But on Motherhood, No Joy’s fearlessly creative, magnificently beat-heavy new record, the outside genre influences are even more radical and esoteric. White-Gluz spikes her dream-pop with trip-hop, nu metal, and a pastiche of time-stamped ’90s club music, from early ’90s U.K. dance-rock to the breakneck big beat of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. The smeared vocals and synths still scan as shoegaze, but the rhythms are pure body music.
That Motherhood somehow never crosses the line into overkill is remarkable, because sometimes it seems to be trying. To heighten the uncanniness of “Nothing Will Hurt,” a knotty tangle of synthesizers and slap bass with echoes of Luscious Jackson, White-Gluz and her collaborators shoved bananas into microphones and wedged kitchen knives into guitar necks. Much as musicians love to trade stories about them, these kinds of DIY studio hacks usually don’t make much difference, but here the cumulative effect lends to the sense of delirium. Even more audacious is the charcoal-blackened “Dream Rat,” which goes full thrash with a viciously growly assist from White-Gluz’s sister Alissa, the vocalist for the Swedish death metal outfit Arch Enemy. Another metal luminary, Kittie’s Tara McLeod, sits in on guitar for the whole album, and for added texture she plays a bit of banjo on several songs, too.
Each song is a Chopped basket, a mish-mash of clashing ingredients that White-Gluz somehow makes work together, from the beat flips and DJ scratches of “Four” to the snapping snares and Siouxsie and the Banshees wails of “Ageless.” And, like the best Chopped chefs, she treats the Cap’n Crunch as reverentially as she does the wagyu. In the hands of a different artist, the album’s hard drum machines and amplified alterna-rock production might be played for kitsch, but White-Gluz never looks down at the sounds she borrows. As irreverent and inherently whimsical as the music often is, White-Gluz’s songwriting is dead serious. Her lyrics blur in and out of focus, but the audible ones touch on motherhood, bodily sacrifice, and fears of aging out of fertility. “Grateful for the family that loves me still, but I can’t seem to make my own,” she sings on the closer “Kidder.”
That sincerity is the secret to why the album hangs together. While White-Gluz fucks around plenty on Motherhood, she’s never just fucking around. In her hands, eccentric genre cues become a means of making difficult subject matter go down easy. And in the process, she reclaims a very ’90s ideal: the belief that if you earnestly love music styles, however mismatched, they should pair together. It didn’t always work out that way in the ’90s, of course– no amount of good intentions was going to redeem some of those Big Audio Dynamite or Bran Van 3000 records—but here White-Gluz wills it so. In the process she’s achieved something remarkable: a shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.
Buy: Rough Trade
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