Album Review: Sick Joy - 'More Forever'
Bringing together professional rock rhythms with the personal thoughts and contemplations, Newcastle-born outfit Sick Joy are back with a brand new full-length record. Giving the masses more and more, the appropriately named More Forever continues their streak of putting out trademark grunge-drenched flows with twelve new tracks.
Worked between their Newcastle home and Brighton base, the record stands as well-rounded as their travels to complete the process. Opening the record with the easing in of intro track ‘Back At The Beginning’, no time is wasted before the guitars come out and the emotions follow with the likes of ‘Nothing Good’ and ‘All Damage’. ‘Nothing Good’ is an abstract retelling of pressure and heartbreak; with frontman Mykl Barton describing the harm caused as colours washing away from a painted canvas, asking the perpetrator, “Can you see them running?”
This imagery is what brought Sick Joy the recognition they gained over the near decade of their career: it’s beautiful and it’s meaningful, but Barton is not afraid to draw attention to the darkness in the light, the wrong following the right. It’s a way of storytelling that draws people in and keeps them listening from the start to the very end. It’s clever, and it’s a skill that can take time, repeated attempts, record after record to perfect. Barton and his collective have taken this time, and trialled the attempts, and they have found their perfect mix.
‘Stockholm Fever’ is a highlight of the record, as a song that meets strength and passion together. Flooded with influences from past alternative subgenres, it greets shredding guitar riffs with elegant piano melodies and is a balance of the glorious and the gory. Beauty and the beast, one may say. And this contrast woven within musical art is where Barton and Sick Joy are at their most actualised.
The record comes to its end with title track ‘Death Scene (More Forever)’, which is one of the more pessimistic but most powerful masterpieces. Bringing More Forever to its natural conclusion, it has that raw DIY style that made the band what they were in the first place. Coming back to their roots with distorted vocals, rough instruments and blood-red fierce feeling in every spit of every lyric, this is what their long-term fans fell for back in their days in the underground scene and this is what they will always return to. The kids may move out of the scene, but the scene will never move out of the kids. It stays and it just grows stronger and stronger.
More Forever may only be Sick Joy’s second album, but it is not their first rodeo. Being a young band in the grand scheme of the music industry, they have much further left to explore, and much more living ahead of them. However, as still young up-and-comers in British rock, they are making the right amount of waves and riding them out to victory. The key is to stick with what’s good and what works, and keep building upon that; and if this album is anything to go by, it looks like Barton and co will be building skyscrapers before long.
Words by Jo Cosgrove
