There's a new Joan of Arc album. And maybe that's okay, because that
electro-noodling dude has gone and taken his crap
famous-guitar-solos-as-glitch-music with him. And they've stopped
doing some cheap and whorish impersonation of Gastr del Sol, and
stopped cutting in and out of songs, so maybe now it's okay for the
emo-kids. And maybe now it's just the Kinsella brothers and their
friends, anyway, and Joan of Arc the band is dead. And maybe
born-again like this it's OK, but probably not OK to like, even
though they've bunkered down with Califone, just like half the SubPop
roster, and even though Tim Kinsella is still funny and wordy and
breaks out this spoken-word near the record's conclusion that is just
beautiful. The song's called "Staying Alive and Lovelessness," no
less, and this disc'd be beloved if it was just so much of songs like
this. On this song, it might just be Tim Kinsella, because the
credits list "Mr. Joan of Arc." Is that him? I really don't know. But
I guess so. What I do know is that Joan of Arc, to me, have been
symbolic of a whole group of boys I know. The kind who as teenagers
loved Pavement, then moved into their first-year emo phase, went from
Joan of Arc to Gastr del Sol, and soon were listening solely to,
like, Morton Feldman and Francisco López. Maybe the Kinsellas
went through this themselves, and by the time they were soundtracking
their uneasy relationship to the color palettes and materialistic
imperialism of chaintastic American clothing stores, they'd grown so
sick of their own songs that they defiled anything representing their
popular-enough-to-be-sold-in-chain-stores past. Now, after that
pseudo-Cap'n Jazz-reunion, they've embraced the earliest part of that
past, and that's buried that guilt, and they're free to build not
just a new Joan of Arc record, but a new Joan of Arc, on that
foundation of freshly tossed soil. Guilt's ghosts are still
lingering, of course, as any band walking forward still has their
pasts trailing behind them. But, for Kinsella(s), maybe this past is
no longer so heavy.
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