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A Joyful Noise

Written by: PP on 10/10/2012 23:02:00

Some of you may have taken note of my journey far outside of my usual genre preferences guided by my curiosity of what makes 'the other side' so popular within the mainstream public. Here I'm talking mostly of folk, pop, singer-songwriter, and that sort of bands, but also bigger indie rock bands like Gossip. In this instance, I've elected to dissect their fifth album "A Joyful Noise" after learning they used to be a danceable blues-rock band 'back in the day' before shifting their sound into mainstream indie rock on recent albums.

As it turns out, "A Joyful Noise" seems to have pushed the band even further away from their roots towards something I'm inclined to call dance pop with indie rock influences. It's danceable, poppy, smooth and sexy all-around, but it is clearly aimed at the disco audiences and the dancefloors than a serious music listener. "Get A Job", for instance, is an example of a song that no real music enthusiast can possibly like given it's cliché R'n'B rhythms and borderline idiotic lyrics that suggest this record should be trashed in an instant. Fortunately, not all songs are like that, and the band source their pop ideals from the 80s (think Madonna, etc) while injecting enough danceable indie rock sound into the mix to make it at least distantly relevant to the readers of this magazine. Still, the band rarely manage to write songs that are even moderately interesting, with the majority being dime-a-dozen b-class pop songs with no real radio potential despite that being the obvious goal here.

Granted, "Perfect World", "Involved" and a few others are reasonable and decent, without ever entering the 'good' territory. The female vocals don't work for me here, and the instrumentals are a little too poppy and electronically manipulated overall for them to cover up for her annoying pitch. In simple terms: "A Joyful Noise" is a pretty boring album.

Download: Perfect World, Involved
For the fans of: Dancefloor indie 'rock', indie pop, etc
Listen: Facebook

Release date 14.05.2012
Columbia Records