Gig Review: The Joy Formidable

The Kazimier, Liverpool | 22 January 2013

Does anyone else play the first song game, where you have a bet on which song will open a gig?  My friends and I have been doing it for a while now and I’ve only recently started to wonder how common it really is.  Is it something everyone does – like how I discovered all lads my age who played Championship Manager growing up ‘interviewed’ their virtual alter ego when they were alone – or is it one of those equally mental things that only I do, such as pretending every boring meeting at work is actually a team of TV writers brainstorming ideas for a new series of The Shield?

My mate who I’m going with tonight has tarred the game a bit after it turned out he’d cheated before we went to see Passion Pit in November, looking on setlist.fm for spoilers.  He still wants to play it tonight but he’s like Lance Armstrong to me now.  In fact, the more I think of it I can’t recall a band we’ve seen where he hasn’t called it spot on.  There’s not much else to talk about as we enjoy a pint in Bier though, so it’s game on, rigged or not.  The Joy Formidable’s new album ‘Wolf’s Law’ only came out yesterday and I’ve heard less than half of it, so I pick ‘Cradle’ from their debut album, and Chris Huhne here opts for their last single, ‘Cholla’.

We arrive at The Kazimier just too late to catch Lazy Genius favourites We Are Animal, although even with about half an hour before The Joy Formidable are due on there’s a pretty full crowd.  There’s also a big fuckoff neon wolf’s head on the back wall, prompting my mate to point out the supposed wolf on his t-shirt. The reality is that he has a poor clip-art version of Foxy Bingo on his clobber, and a couple of bystanders agree with me when I point this out to him.

Not long after we find a spec right in the centre of the floor, the lights dim and my favourite Welsh alt-rock trio are down the stairs and on the stage, with Ritzy Bryan sporting a lovely royal blue guitar.  She bursts into the opening riffs of ‘Cholla’ (hmmm…) all wide-eyed and outstretched arms, like Alice Glass’s happy little sister, asking ‘Where are we going? What are we doing?’ as if she actually wants the crowd to answer her.  She smiles a lot early on, but as she sings the outro of the gorgeous ‘The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade’ there are definite tears in her eyes.  Sad ones.

Bryan’s interaction with the crowd is a little awkward at first, but gets better. (I recently saw her sort-of namesake Brian Fallon from The Gaslight Anthem struggle initially with the Manchester Apollo audience, asking us all if we supported City, United or – bizarrely – Watford.) After ‘Austere’ she talks about how she enjoys playing in Liverpool, as the crowds “always enjoy a good fucking heckle.”  Predictably this encourages a few Soccer AM crew member types to start shouting crap jokes at her, and she wisely moves on to the next song, ‘This Ladder is Ours’: the opener to ‘Wolf’s Law’ and as good a Track 1 as I’ve heard in a while.

When ‘Cradle’ starts up about halfway through the set, we get the best example yet of the huge noise all of the band’s live reviews seem to mention.  The crowd go nuts for this one and it’s impressive to see a three-piece make such a racket.  I’d wondered if Ritzy’s vocals might have been drowned out but I needn’t have; her voice is strong all night and on the slower songs it is stunning, in a way that isn’t as obvious on their records.  Their first acoustic number ‘Silent Treatment’ encapsulates everyone apart from a small, annoying group towards the back who talk and laugh quite a bit too loudly throughout it.  Their last three songs all comfortably pass the five-minute mark, but none of them hang around longer than they should, with ‘Maw Maw Song’ probably the moment most people in attendance tonight will remember above all (even if it could do with a snappier title).  It’s been a well-paced set with little in the way of filler, and when the band go back up the staircase after just twelve songs nobody here feels short changed.

At the start of the encore I get a text off my cousin saying, “Limbs everywhere in the away end.”  Bradford City have knocked Aston Villa out of the League Cup at Villa Park.  There are limbs everywhere here too during a mammoth ten-minute rendition of ‘Whirring’, the song which Paul McCartney’s new drummer Dave Grohl called the song of the year in 2011. It's a wall of noise with Ritzy banging her axe against a big gong that gets used for the first and only time, and letting one fan at the front play her guitar with her for a few cool seconds.  The Joy Formidable leave having promised not to wait so long for their next return to Liverpool.  Their US tour ends a fortnight before Sound City 2013, incidentally.  What odds on us seeing them in a slightly bigger venue this May?

After we leave I start to wonder how I will do a write-up without sounding relentlessly positive.  Apart from the unwelcome chatter in the crowd and one or two set list omissions though, I can’t think of anything I didn’t enjoy about the night.  And besides, those two things happen at most gigs.  Luckily a super-fan we end up talking to in a bar is furious about how corporate his heroes have become.  A couple of his rants ring true; the new album wasn’t on sale at the venue (for a reason largely unexplained by the band other than being the fault of some unidentified “bastards”), and there were fliers everywhere offering the chance for fans to meet the band as long as they spent over £30 on merchandise, the kind of offer that would probably please as many people as it dismays.  His “I saw them play my college before they went massive” shout is a bit much though, seeing as they just played to about 200 people and his own girlfriend had, and I quote, “never heard of them, the bint”.

Anyway, these are one of the best rock bands in Britain right now.  See them live before they errm, go massive.

KM

Setlist 1. Cholla  2. Austere  3. This Ladder is Ours  4. The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade  5. Little Blimp  6. While the Flies  7. Cradle  8. Tendons  9. Silent Treatment  10. Maw Maw Song  11. I Don't Want to See You Like This  12. Love is the Ever Changing Spectrum of a Lie Encore: 13. Wolf's Law  14. Whirring

'Wolf's Law' is available now on Amazon and in all good record stores but not on hmv.com because it's not there anymore.