Albums
No Joy / Sonic Boom - EP
2018
Genre: Electronic
Release Date: 2018
By Nina Corcoran
Reviewed March 31, 2018
The Canadian shoegaze band’s singer teams up with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember in an attempt to push past their comfort zone into electronic territory.
In an ideal scenario, artistic collaborations work a kind of magic: Two talents add up to more than the sum of their parts, with creativity and curiosity yielding an end product that wouldn’t otherwise exist. That’s what Jasamine White-Gluz of Canadian shoegaze band No Joy had in mind when she began emailing with Sonic Boom, a.k.a. Pete Kember from Spacemen 3, in the fall of 2015. The more her band stayed within the confines of rock, the more White-Gluz wanted change. So No Joy decided to release three EPs that departed from the band’s shoegaze and noise-pop past, starting with 2016’s Drool Sucker and 2017’s . The final installment in this series, , sees White-Gluz venturing into unfamiliar electronic territory with Kember. But while the pairing of their two sounds is unexpected, that initial surprise is about as far as the EP goes. It’s tepid from start to finish, offering little that feels exciting or inspired.