Joyce Manor songs are like puppies. They come bounding out of the speakers, full of energy, desperate to love and be loved, and then wear themselves out in a couple of minutes. This time the puppies are a bit more grown up, a bit less energetic, but no less affectionate or fun. Golden Retrievers maybe, rather than Jack Russells. Shit metaphor – I’ve never seen a dog bounding out of a speaker – but you get the point.
Cody will probably be Joyce Manor’s crossover album. It’s easier on the ear, better produced, more mature than 2014’s relentless Never Hungover Again. It’s not quite as good – few pop-punk albums are – but what it loses in raw energy, it makes up for in pure songcraft. It represents the kind of leap The Lemonheads made from Lovey to It’s a Shame About Ray, and the comparisons don’t end there, as in its mellower moments, singer Barry Johnson’s vocals have a definite whiff of Dando to them (and he no longer sings like Officer Barbrady off South Park, though my jury’s still out as to whether or not that’s a good thing).
Cody kicks off with the irresistible double-whammy of ‘Fake ID,’ a withering takedown of the vacuity of so much modern discourse (“What do you think about Kanye West?/ I think that he’s great, I think he’s the best/ Yeah I think he’s better than John Steinbeck”) set to a tune that breaks the 2016 Earworm Speed Record; whilst ‘Eighteen’ is kind of an emo ‘Everybody Hurts’ (“At 18 life’s a bad dream, then you wake up… Everybody gets a little lonely sometimes”) and is the closest Cody comes to sounding like the old JM.
But where Never Hungover Again started off at an hysterical pitch and just continued to up the intensity right to the end, Cody slackens off rather too much in its mid-section, with the pleasant but inconsequential jangle of ‘Angel in the Snow,’ the pointless acoustic interlude of ‘Do You Really Want to Get Better’ (the band have apparently been listening to a lot of Sun Kil Moon, and they should stop doing so immediately before this becomes a habit), and the forgettable ‘Last You Heard of Me.’
Thankfully, and unusually in an age when albums tend to be front-loaded, Cody’s second half is totally, utterly ace. The glorious ‘Make Me Dumb’ pulls off a really lovely trick of switching mid-line from anger (“as dumb as a fuckin’ piece of junk”) to nostalgia (“on a summer sidewalk, in the summer sun, when you were young”), and its very existence means it no longer really matters much that Weezer have been shit since Maladroit. ‘This Song Is a Mess’ is pure Lemonheads, from its 2-minute length to its dopey, self-deprecating slacker charm. But it’s ‘Stairs,’ clocking in at a relatively epic 4 minutes, that bestrides the album like a colossus, a chugging powerpop monster dripping with self-loathing (“I’m 26 and I still live with my parents, oh I can’t do laundry, Christ I can’t do dishes”), which then transforms itself into a sparkly, late period Smiths-y thing with some truly beautiful Marr-influenced guitar. Savvy greetings card manufacturers are no doubt already making greetings cards with the line “what would I do without you? Be careful when you run downstairs” in time for 14 February 2017.
And, like the album as a whole, ‘Stairs‘ leaves you wondering excitedly just where this band will go next because, potentially, with talent like this they have the world at their feet. They just need to turn the volume back up next time, and rediscover their inner Jack Russell. Nope, still doesn’t work.
