Joyce Manor, a nationally popular quartet from Torrance, California, plays pop punk with exactly the kind of melodies and snotty-but-vulnerable singsong delivery that you are hearing in your head right now. Their lyrics, as you have already surmised, are funny, self-effacing, simultaneously ironic and sincere, more hurt than hurtful, concerned with love and the paradoxes of punk values. Their early EPs, as you would guess, are fizzy, abrasive and small-sounding, but possessed of an ecstatic energy and drive that appeal straight to the basement show in your heart; their latest, Never Hungover Again on Asian Man Records, boasts the big bottom and groomed high-end sheen of a major-label debut without sacrificing an iota of their brevity or their wit.
There is more tambourine on Never Hungover Again and a sensibly (not radically) expanded dynamic range and groove palette; but Joyce Manor knows precisely what itch they scratch, and they do not venture far from the spot. Joyce Manor is also one of the bigger fishes reeled in by BSP in the last year, though perhaps a little off-axis for the Kingston club that helped break Lucius, Future Islands and more ascending stars of the smartypants world of contemporary indie rock.
When Joyce Manor packs BSP on Friday, January 16, they’ll be accompanied by Quarterbacks: a New Paltz trio, recent Team Love Records signee and practitioners of an absurdly smart and inventive take on the pop/punk thing. In what appears to be an odd juxtaposition, the mad-talented new Americana rock singer/songwriter Laura Stevenson, fresh off several months of touring the US and Europe with her band, opens the show with a solo set. Appearances be damned: For all her range and sensitivity as a writer and recording artist, Stevenson’s antecedents are in that pop/punk world; her label, Don Giovanni Records, is the one that brought us the Ergs, Screaming Females and many other somewhat non-traditional punk luminaries, and her full-band shows make no secret of her pop/punk club affiliation.
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Joyce Manor/Quarterbacks/Laura Stevenson, Friday, January 16, 8 p.m., 16+ (under 18 w/ adult), $15, BSP, 323 Wall Street, Kingston; www.bspkingston.com.
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