Music

No Joy discuss their work ethic; predict madness on upcoming tour with Best Coast & Wavves

by Melody Lau

Long distance relationships can force one’s creativity and in the case of Montreal “doomgazer” duo No Joy that was exactly what sparked the beginning of their musical friendship.

“It wouldn’t have started if Jasmine didn’t move to LA,” said singer Laura Lloyd. “We wouldn’t have thought of it and there wouldn’t have been the integral e-mailing; the band started with e-mails.” After friend and now band mate Jasmine White-Gluz moved to Los Angeles last November the two maintained a strong bond with their shared feelings of misery. “She was miserable there but she escaped the winter and I was miserable because I didn’t so we just started writing songs about being miserable and sending them to back and forth.”

After White-Gluz returned to Montreal, they began piecing songs together and quickly realized that they needed more songs in order to flourish and perform live. From there, Lloyd and White-Gluz enlisted additional help in the form of a bassist and a drummer, turning the duo into a four piece but the pair remained as the primary songwriters.

But even though Lloyd and White-Gluz spend all their time together now Lloyd still admits that they often write songs in separate rooms. “As much as I enjoy the e-mail courting, I grew tired…actually, not really. We still write songs at home and send them to each other even though we live twenty minutes apart!”

The pair called up their friend Graham Van Pelt (Think About Life, Miracle Fortress) to help record a 7” but found the process poorly-planned and disorganized. “Under those circumstances, it was just kind of weird,” Lloyd admitted. “You can just tell by the end of the song that we didn’t know what we were doing; it was improvised and it was a last minute decision to record with him.”

“The fact that it was released is funny to me,” added White-Gluz. “It was completely made up on the spot and he even deleted the masters after because he figured that no one was going to want them.”

When it came time to record their full-length debut Ghost Blonde the band retreated from outside help and recorded it themselves, with The Ravonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner mixing afterwards. “I preferred it that way just because we had more control over stuff and I would like to just keep recording ourselves,” said White-Gluz.

No Joy may have mastered their preferences when it came to recording but one aspect of their music that they still have trouble with are song titles. “We have working titles,” said Lloyd. The band has a tendency to name tracks after bands they believe the song is reminiscent of but frequently find themselves wrong. “We have this song called ‘Ramones’ but it sounds nothing like the Ramones,” said Lloyd. “In my head it sounded like ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ but it doesn’t!”

“Sometimes people ask for those songs,” added White-Gluz. “They’ll take the setlist off the stage and we’ll be like ‘No!’ because there’s all these band names on it!”

The band will embark on a tour this winter with Mexican Summer label mates Best Coast and friends Wavves and Lloyd and White-Gluz already predict madness. “It’s going to be stupid,” said Lloyd. “Bobb [Bruno, of Best Coast] already told me that it’s his personal mission on that tour to get me to drink as much whiskey as possible and I can’t handle whiskey, I vomit all the time so I already know it’s all downhill from here.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re just all going to be dead after the tour,” said Lloyd. White-Gluz interjected and suggests that the band should make a record prior to the tour and release it after their deaths. “Put it out like Michael Jackson and then record vocal tracks that could be mixed with rapper songs!”