January 23, 2012
#19: Joan Of Arc - Life Like Back when Joan Of Arc started, in the mid-90s, I wanted to love them. Cap’n Jazz, whom I totally loved, had just broken up, and other than Davy VonBohlen (who’d gone on to start The Promise Ring) and Victor Villareal (who, if dark hints in magazine articles about Cap’n Jazz’s dissolution were to be believed, had disappeared into some sort of debilitating drug addiction), everyone else from Cap’n Jazz was now in Joan Of Arc. Of course, what should have been a recipe for awesomeness ended up being something totally baffling—an experimental, ambient collection of found sounds and song fragments that rarely added up to anything that felt like a finished song. A Portable Model Of, their debut album, had its moments, and its followup, How Memory Works, was on point more often than not, but their third and fourth albums (Live In Chicago 1997, which was not actually a live album, and The Gap) were so weird that I gave up and quit paying attention to Joan Of Arc entirely. At some point in the late 90s, the original four-piece lineup of Cap’n Jazz, including a now clean and sober Victor Villareal, reunited under the name Owls and produced a quirky but charming and fun indie-rock album. But I was still deeply suspicious of Joan Of Arc, especially once it became a rotating cast of musicians in which Tim Kinsella was the only constant member. I suspected that Tim was too artsy for his own good, that the real pop genius in the family was his brother Mike, who’d played drums in Cap’n Jazz and Owls but truly blossomed as the guitarist for American Football, and as a solo artist performing under the name Owen. Anyway, I probably would still be ignoring Joan Of Arc if it weren’t for the fact that they played in Richmond at the very beginning of 2011. A friend of mine convinced me to go to the show with her by informing me that Victor Villareal had joined the band recently, and that they were doing Owls songs as part of their live set. It was true—Joan Of Arc played an excellent version of “Everyone Is My Friend” during their set that night—but what was even more surprising to me was the high quality of the eight or so new songs they began their set with. Eventually Tim announced that the songs they’d been playing would be out in a few months on a new album they’d recorded with Steve Albini a few months before. Life Like is that album, and the quality of the songwriting that I’d already discovered during the live performance is highlighted by Albini’s straightforward production on this album. In marked contrast to any previous Joan Of Arc recordings I’ve heard, this album is the exact sort of quirky, off-kilter, but fundamentally catchy collection of pop songs I had hoped for from Joan Of Arc back in the mid-90s when they started. Kinsella and Villareal weave their dueling guitar lines around each other in a complex but not intrusive fashion, and when Kinsella layers his technically unskilled vocal lines overtop of them, the melodies avoid competing with each other, instead managing to weave themselves together into something that’s catchy in aggregate regardless of how bizarre the underpinning structure is. This four-piece unit, grounded by the strong playing of drummer Theo Katsaounis and bassist Bobby Burg, are able to maintain a fundamental grasp on rocking—something the early Joan Of Arc lineups could do for one out of every 10 minutes at best—and therefore have a structural cohesion that holds the entire album together. This album is significantly better than anything previously released under the name Joan Of Arc (well, anything that I ever heard), and it’s just a shame that it took Kinsella fifteen years to find his musical footing.

#19: Joan Of Arc - Life Like

Back when Joan Of Arc started, in the mid-90s, I wanted to love them. Cap’n Jazz, whom I totally loved, had just broken up, and other than Davy VonBohlen (who’d gone on to start The Promise Ring) and Victor Villareal (who, if dark hints in magazine articles about Cap’n Jazz’s dissolution were to be believed, had disappeared into some sort of debilitating drug addiction), everyone else from Cap’n Jazz was now in Joan Of Arc. Of course, what should have been a recipe for awesomeness ended up being something totally baffling—an experimental, ambient collection of found sounds and song fragments that rarely added up to anything that felt like a finished song. A Portable Model Of, their debut album, had its moments, and its followup, How Memory Works, was on point more often than not, but their third and fourth albums (Live In Chicago 1997, which was not actually a live album, and The Gap) were so weird that I gave up and quit paying attention to Joan Of Arc entirely.

At some point in the late 90s, the original four-piece lineup of Cap’n Jazz, including a now clean and sober Victor Villareal, reunited under the name Owls and produced a quirky but charming and fun indie-rock album. But I was still deeply suspicious of Joan Of Arc, especially once it became a rotating cast of musicians in which Tim Kinsella was the only constant member. I suspected that Tim was too artsy for his own good, that the real pop genius in the family was his brother Mike, who’d played drums in Cap’n Jazz and Owls but truly blossomed as the guitarist for American Football, and as a solo artist performing under the name Owen.

Anyway, I probably would still be ignoring Joan Of Arc if it weren’t for the fact that they played in Richmond at the very beginning of 2011. A friend of mine convinced me to go to the show with her by informing me that Victor Villareal had joined the band recently, and that they were doing Owls songs as part of their live set. It was true—Joan Of Arc played an excellent version of “Everyone Is My Friend” during their set that night—but what was even more surprising to me was the high quality of the eight or so new songs they began their set with. Eventually Tim announced that the songs they’d been playing would be out in a few months on a new album they’d recorded with Steve Albini a few months before. Life Like is that album, and the quality of the songwriting that I’d already discovered during the live performance is highlighted by Albini’s straightforward production on this album.

In marked contrast to any previous Joan Of Arc recordings I’ve heard, this album is the exact sort of quirky, off-kilter, but fundamentally catchy collection of pop songs I had hoped for from Joan Of Arc back in the mid-90s when they started. Kinsella and Villareal weave their dueling guitar lines around each other in a complex but not intrusive fashion, and when Kinsella layers his technically unskilled vocal lines overtop of them, the melodies avoid competing with each other, instead managing to weave themselves together into something that’s catchy in aggregate regardless of how bizarre the underpinning structure is.

This four-piece unit, grounded by the strong playing of drummer Theo Katsaounis and bassist Bobby Burg, are able to maintain a fundamental grasp on rocking—something the early Joan Of Arc lineups could do for one out of every 10 minutes at best—and therefore have a structural cohesion that holds the entire album together. This album is significantly better than anything previously released under the name Joan Of Arc (well, anything that I ever heard), and it’s just a shame that it took Kinsella fifteen years to find his musical footing.

9:06pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayFGZoFV
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: Top 20 of 2011 
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  4. lecollecteur said: I agree with most of what you said, but I think you should really listen to Boo! Human.Maybe you’ll like it, it’s my favorite record of JoA so far, it has some amazing moments. It’s not a weird-artsy thing or anything, it’s just made of great songs.
  5. andrewtsks posted this