Joyful Noise Recordings – JNR353
Tim Melina Theo Bobby, the last album by Joan of Arc, plays as if Tim
Kinsella, Melina Ausikaitis, Theo Katsaounis, and Bobby Burg sat down to
compile their greatest hits, remembered they aren’t the kind of band
that writes hits, and decided to try out a little bit of everything.
There’s an effective literalism to this approach: If you’ve ever liked a
Joan of Arc song, then you’ll almost certainly like some of these. And
if you didn’t, then track 1 sounds exactly like American Football—talk
about an instant crowd pleaser.
This is how a lot of people first come to Joan of Arc, of course: Via
the most memed house in Champaign-Urbana, tracing the ways Tim Kinsella
and his younger brother Mike’s musical careers have crisscrossed since
Cap’n Jazz, the inventive and influential emo band they founded as
teenagers. Joan of Arc’s anxious deadpan meandering and virtuoso
weirdness can be a more acquired taste, and there’s a lot to
acquire—they’ve released 20-some albums in the past 20 years. No two are
especially alike, except for the constant presence of Tim Kinsella and a
spirit of diffident, digressive unpredictability. And now it’s over.
As an album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is maybe even less concerned than
usual with coherence, which tends to create the atmosphere of a singles
collection. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s about time and boundaries,
the things that separate concepts like then and now or you and me.
Musically, this can sound like a walk through Joan of Arc’s tangly,
overgrown garden: the sawtoothed strums of “Karma Repair Kit” (“I got a
lot of good to do/To possibly come out even”), the moodier reflecting
pool of “Creature and Being,” the wet-noodle synth of “Land Surveyor.”
Over the motorik groove of “Cover Letter,” Kinsella reviews his résumé,
How to With John Wilson-style, reflecting on the many, many other jobs
he’s performed in service to music: “I prepared various coffee
drinks/And I waited tables stoned…/Afternoon shift selling businessmen
porn in order to keep the shelves stocked with underground and foreign
art films/And I wrote songs.” The hustle sounds like a drag; the song
doesn’t, which is where the pathos comes in.
But Joan of Arc have always been a band of multiple simultaneous
perspectives—never more than now, when Kinsella and Ausikaitis divide
lead vocal duties. As a medium for undermining literal meaning,
Ausikaitis is unrivaled; her lyrics can be funny, visceral, or morbid
but always mysterious and absurd. “Another role where the movie ends,
nice/It’s a natural conclusion that people can buy,” she sings at the
top of “Feedback 3/4” (sounds just like the name says). I picture her
reading film scripts, reaching for galaxy-brained director questions
like But what is ending, actually? and So if this is ending, then what
is life? Her riddles make for really good songs, like standout
“Something Kind,” where a creeping, knotted guitar melody escalates to a
noisy window.
