If You Love Somebody

No Joy “Birthmark”

One of the great pleasures of watching artists evolve over long stretches of time is in noticing how their aesthetic shifts along with their capabilities, and influences that were once only implied become overt as others that were on the surface recede. No Joy started as a more blunt and primitive version of a shoegaze band with blaring guitars and buried vocals, but all along suggesting a delicate sentimentality and sophisticated melodic sensibility. As the band has become more of a solo project for Jasamine White-Gluz, the music has gradually moved towards foregrounding what was once obscured while maintaining an artsy haze and exaggerated sense of spacial relationships in the mixes. On Motherhood, the forthcoming new album by No Joy, White-Gluz has refined her aesthetic to the point that anything she does now sounds fully like her even when she’s emulating elements of trip-hop, nü-metal, and ’90s adult contemporary pop. It’s always been in there, she’s now just making it more obvious – no shame, just beauty and feeling.

“Birthmark,” the lead track off Motherhood, consolidates all of White-Gluz’s major musical threads from the past six years into one gorgeous and emotionally direct pop song. When I hear the song the word that comes to mind is “clarity” – in the arrangement and mix, in the vocal performance, in the lyrics, in the abstract sense that it sounds like a musical approximation of a crystal chandelier. The ways she’s implied nonlinear vagueness and a collage-maker’s sense of textural juxtaposition is all there, but it’s more in the service of articulating the complexity of a feeling rather than in masking or muting it. She’s not being at all ambiguous in singing openly about love, but the way she does it is up for interpretation: What kind of love, and how intense is it?

Buy it from Bandcamp.