Joan of Arc - So much staying alive and lovelessness - 2003

				On a Bedsheet in the Breeze
	Joan of Arc’s output over the past five years has been deliberately off putting, with a studio album entitled “Live in Chicago” and an EP “How can something so little be any more”; they clearly enjoy word-play, a well crafted joke, musical gags. But their titles are not all that have put both critics and listeners off their output. They haven’t really seemed eager to please; their previous album “The Gap” being a cut and paste affair, stumbling over itself, stopping when you want it to go, and going where you wish it wouldn’t; lyrically abstract and often obtuse. People have called them pretentious, pointless and vacuous; existing purely as a post-ironic joke, a bunch of clever kids with no real rock and roll soul. Because isn’t that what rock music is about; about bravado, swaggering tight-trousered cool and big venue Marshall Cabinet soul? Well, perhaps. But not, one feels, for Joan of Arc. The bands latest offering is a relatively subdued affair, there are no explosions, no logic defying breaks in rhythm, no skwals or beeps, no messing. That said, this is no Indie Guitar Rock album to lend to your younger brother (though he should be exposed to it), there are complexities and obstructions for any listener, and confusions a-plenty. Joan of Arc’s appeal oscillates between the real and the abstract, and one of the bands greatest talents is achieving the latter via the former. Where as many artists, particularly in the field of electronic music (I’m thinking Susumu Yokota, Boards of Canada et al) achieve a sense of the abstract by blurring boundaries, hiding distinct tones and rhythms in a fog of sound, repeating motives to dispel the finite, JOA manage to get a similar effect with clarity. Every sound on the record seems magnified, guitars and drums are miked closely, slips of fingers, crackles, buzz are all audible, the vocals often inconsistent in tone. The whole process recalls what the modernists referred to as “foregrounding”, bringing the working method into view and making this what the thing is about, rather than just method as tool. The record seems to want to give up the secrets of its process through the spaciousness of its sounds, its transparency, clarity. The guitars all sound like glass, but the phrasing is always organic, the guitar break in “Olivia Lost” is messy, but real, its staccato piano riff just skewed enough to reveal the hand playing it. The album’s cover  is a photograph of a seated figure with a large red dot covering the face, possibly a porno joke, possibly a comment on the difficulties of revealing the human behind the work. The overall effect of all this extreme close up is not to show precision, but to expose the roughness of the surface. At this distance the thing is focus become abstract, like the pattern of skin under a microscope. What we are looking at in more real, but it seems less. It recalls what Milan Kundera says about the feeling of vertigo: It can be caused by proximity to an object, as well as by distance from it. The same goes for abstraction. Lyrically the record can be obtuse to the point of annoyance, seeming overly clever or deliberately odd so as to be contrived. I can’t be bothered to untangle, ”And now is bitter somehow better than being not even a little lost or looking” or  “The slow bounce of the heat will still rent the open”. Besides these example though,  there is some wonderful imagery at work: “2 black eyes, like symmetrical eels across her cheekbones” and “Undone slow and elk nude in an afternoon bath” both read and sound beautifully, poetic and musical, a rare thing in rock music. This language, complex, image-full, pretty, works well with the lovely booklet that accompanies the CD. I also feel that it provides an excellent analogy for Joan of Arc’s music: a range of vibrantly coloured interior and landscape shots, some in perfect focus, others blurred to the point of abstraction, but all luminous and pleasing to the eye. www.jadetree.com www.epitonic.com

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