Soul Freak Dub Sounds

They’ll love it.

So I’m going to start a new section of this blog where I review the shows I’ve seen and the venues I’ve been to. This is the first installment. I don’t really know how to write so until that happens I’m just going to drone on about it. If you can make it to the end my hats off to you!

So on May 7th, I went to see The Joy Formidable at the Culture Room in Ft.Lauderdale Florida. I hadn’t listened to the Joy Formidable much before so I listened to their debut “The Big Roar” that day and I was pretty impressed. Its a pop album with the clear production and the hooks and the vocals that come with that. Most of the songs start off more traditional with guitar progressions and vocal melodies but then quite a few times they go off into these repetitive grooves that grow into this wall of sound sort of thing that I always like. The mix of pop and noisy space outs works better than I might have thought it would. I like the album. Its something a little different and its got a really good energy.

So Io Echo went on first and they were alright. They were very stylish. The drummer had this 80’s jacket and they wore lots of flowers. Their lead singer, Ioanna Gika, is a pretty good front women, she got as into it as she could I think. They played alright but they had no bass player and they used backing tracks for a lot of songs. I am whole heartedly against the use of backing tracks ever. It makes me feel cheated. I came to the show to see something real and see something thats in the moment. Using a backing track traps the music, it limits full expression of the musicians and the band. When they weren’t using backing tracks they got into some cool grooves though and overall I enjoyed it.

Joy Formidable went on pretty soon after. They came out like rock stars, one at a time to some song. Their sound was off from the start and I’m pretty sure it just got worse from there. They were playing ok but the bass was so muddy and the vocals were muddy and the guitar was practically inaudible. They brought out these huge pedal boards with tons of pedals on them but their tone didn’t sound very impressive. To be fair a lot of the sound problems were probably because of the venue. The culture room is this weird shape and the stage is really high and I think it kind of funnels the sound up into the ceiling. 

They also used backing tracks, sometimes worse then Io Echo. There were points when we were all just listening to a CD. No one was playing music. The best parts were when they went out into the wall of sound space outs that I was talking about. They would get loud for a minute and for a second I would forget about all the issues that were going on and they would get into this really good groove and the crowd would get really into and then they would stop right as it reached its peak. This only happened a few times, most of the show was just really boring. 

They were pretty awkward too. Maybe they are really popular in England but they aren’t that popular here. They acted like rockstars the whole time and they really weren’t playing good enough to justify it so the crowd was  only sort of into it. The lead singer kept throwing picks into the crowd and no one really gave a shit or knew why she was doing it so they would just fall to the ground. At one point someone yelled something to the band and they replied by saying they encourage band to audience interaction, completely ignoring the comment in the process. 

The Culture Room sucks so thats part of the reason they sucked but I think they had some other issues. They just didn’t seem like that good of a band. They weren’t that talented technically on their instruments, except the drummer, and they didn’t have very good energy. They had a few good points but i wouldn’t go see them again. Io Echo was more interesting. I think if Io Echo got a full band and got rid of the backing tracks they could really get somewhere. 

All in all, Io Echo was ok and the Joy Formidable was pretty bad. The sound was awful but that probably wasn’t all their fault. Go listen to their first album. I enjoyed it a lot more than seeing them live.