The Joy Formidable's long-gestating debut full-length opens with roughly 45 seconds of some unspecified, arrhythmic clatter-- it could be hail stones pelting a cold tin roof, or a door opening and closing, or fireworks, or just the over-amplified sound of typewriter keys hitting paper. On their own terms, these noises might feel jarring and bothersome, but compared to what transpires over the next 49 minutes, they seem like an oddly naturalistic, curiously imprecise element on album that sounds otherwise scientifically engineered to make the Joy Formidable sound like the Biggest Band in the World, rendering traditional metrics like No. 1 chart rankings and platinum records as mere formalities.
After a decade that saw Britpop break down into Franz Ferdinandian funk, Arctic Monkeys insolence, and xx-ian austerity, the Joy Formidable project a certain guileless bravado rarely heard since the mid-1990s. For this Welsh trio, a Glastonbury main-stage headlining slot doesn't represent some distant career goal to gradually aspire to, but a deeply ingrained spiritual state of mind. This notion informs every rocket-launcher riff and back-of-the-bleacher chorus heard throughout The Big Roar, the title of which is but a surface indication of the band's wanton disregard for subtlety. The deliberate nature of the Joy Formidable's aesthetic can be evinced by the fact that four of the songs here first appeared in alternate form on the 2009 mini-LP A Balloon Called Moaning and have been retooled for this big-league debut on Atlantic. And in some cases rather dramatically: the sprightly pop single "Whirring" now comes appended with an extended, accelerated and supremely arse-kicking coda-- complete will dual bass-drum triggers-- that suggests "You Made Me Realise"-era My Bloody Valentine with a young Lars Ulrich behind the kit.
But with her Corgan-like tendency to slather the songs with infinite layers of grungy guitar gloss, Ritzy Bryan at times comes perilously close to overpowering her own bracing voice, which becomes an increasingly important humanizing element amid The Big Roar's in-the-red onslaught. It's somewhat telling that the album's massive opener "The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie" fades out rather uneventfully after a dramatic seven-minute build, as if the band members suddenly lost their place in its thickening thundercloud of noise and didn't know where else to go. The Joy Formidable are wise to offset their more colossal tracks with shorter, snappier, new-wavy numbers ("I Don't Want to See You Like This", "Cradle"), but even in smaller doses, they rarely relent in their pedal-through-the-metal ballast. As a result, songs like the dancefloor-bound "Austere" and the slow-motion lurch of "Buoy" are robbed of their dynamic variation and definition. The atmospheric late-album ballad "Llaw = Wall"-- the lone vocal turn by bassist Rhydian Dafydd-- initially marks a change of pace, but even that cedes to an inevitable quiet-to-loud mid-song eruption. (A he-said/she-said duet along the lines of 2010's spirited Paul Draper collab "Greyhounds in the Slips" would've added a welcome new dimension to the sound here.) There's no denying the Joy Formidable's passion, vigor, and pop smarts; it would just be easier to appreciate those qualities if The Big Roar didn't so often sound like a big blur.
