Energetic indie rock comfort food

In the early 2010s, there was a wave of indie rock bands that seemed restless, ramshackle, and endearingly fervent. Much of this music was released via the Salinas Records label – bands like All Dogs, Radiator Hospital and early projects by Crutchfield, PS Eliot and Swearin’. Joyride! were the San Francisco outpost of that sound, combining the urgency of the pop-punk denizens of Bay Area Jawbreaker with a certain twee emotivity that drifted from the Pacific Northwest. Many of those early Salinas bands are no longer around, or their members got involved in different projects, and it looked like Joyride! could have suffered the same fate. After releasing three full-length albums in six years, culminating in 2016’s stellar album Half Moon Bay, Joyride! took a long break. They did what most bands end up doing: keep jobs or find new ones, occasionally play in other groupsexplored what life is like away from music.

But this week, Joyride! return with the first new album in six years, wonder question, which finds the group picking up where it left off. It’s warm and delightfully energetic, and while the songs reflect the indecision that comes from not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life, wonder question goes down like pure comfort food. The trio are a tight-knit unit, bouncing off each other with chiming guitars and nervous drums and lyrics that are delivered in breathless rush. Band leader Jenna Marx is a constant and engaging presence in these songs – she talks herself through existential crises, makes big statements and dismisses them as quickly as the band follows her minute thought patterns with excitability and thrill.

A large number of wonder questionThe lyrical concerns of focus on feeling like an anachronism, stuck in time and wondering if you’re doing enough or are enough as you’re torn between the comfort of a familiar place and the possibility tempting from a new place. wonder question most often sounds like a love letter to San Francisco, the city the band grew up in and managed to stay for all these years despite extreme gentrification And one housing market out of control.

In “Archivist”, Marx struggles with this choice to stay in his rapidly changing house: “I can stay here or I can go / But I can’t predict the future, I’ve already tried”, he sings. -she. “I’m scared of being left but I’m scared of leaving too/ So I kept a file, it was spotless, I documented everything.” This document includes evocative journeys into the past. It is the “carousel that turns in the park where we kissed, in the city where I am the last to live”. It’s “St. Mary’s,” the local bar that “bears the same name as the hospital you went to in seventh grade,” where Marx once “sat in the waiting room with your father and watched him pray.” These are entertaining fantasies of packing up and moving into a flyover state where “we could remember the ocean fondly like an old friend who has passed away” but being in love with the story of a city, “everything shook like the earthquake of 89 when the Giants played the Like.”

The group manages to make a big city feel insular and lived in, and that’s where Marx stays, haunting his hometown like a ghost and trying to maintain the relationships it always has. She opts for decidedly small-scale adventures. On “Emergency Broadcast System”, she finds escape in a brief ride (hey) around town: “What if we leave but don’t get far? What if you get in my getaway car and I take you back before it gets dark? On “In The Afterglow,” she soothes her anxiety with aimless driving: “I put a few miles on this car/When I feel sad, I drive it far/And no matter where you are/Do know where you’re going when you leave or what you’re looking for.

Marx’s voice often coils at the end of one of his long phrases, making each song feel like an open song. wonder question. In therapy, the “miracle question” is an imaginary future where you wake up, all your problems are mysteriously solved. So the question is: what has changed? And what comes next? Sometimes the answers are simple, sometimes they are unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes it’s enough to talk about it with friends over 12 rambling songs that unfold in a propulsive 28 minutes. The music that Joyride! fact isn’t necessarily flashy, but it sure is satisfying.

wonder question was released 4/15 via Salinas Records. Pre-order it here.

Other albums of note released this week:
• Kurt Vile (watch my moves)
• Waves of 50 feet Black Pearl
• Jewelry freewheeling woman
• Alex G’s We’re all going to the world’s fair soundtrack
• Herd of Dimes Head of Roses: Ghost Member collection
• James Krivchenia (of Big Thief) blood karaoke
• The Crystal method The trip
• The Swedish House Mafia Heaven again
• Tim Kasher’s Middle age
• Vundabar Devil for fire
• Prince Daddy & The Hyena’s eponymous
• Leikeli47’s shape up
• Jerry Paper’s Free time
•Alec Benjamin (De)comment
• Quaker Wedding Total dismay
• Greyhaven’s This bright and beautiful world
• A shout from Wilhelm lose your illusion
• SAVAK Human Error / Human Delight
• These arms are snakes Duct tape and shivering crows
• Rush’s Moving Pictures – 40th Anniversary
• Sharing Home Is Where and Record Setter dissecting lesson PE
• La Neve’s Story solved PE
• Chez Mal Blum Isn’t it nice PE