Album review: Joyce Manor – I Used To Go To This Bar

Joyce Manor have made mellowing out an artform. By the Californian pop-punk stalwarts’ own account, I Know Where Mark Chen Lives, the 110-second opening track of their defiantly laid-back seventh album is all about frontman Barry Johnson and guitarist Chase Knobbe drinking beers, getting blazed and reminiscing about the lawless nights right before weed was fully legalised in their home state. Loaded with good humour, mild-peril and massive hooks (‘Train coming down the track / And it almost gave me a heart attack!’) it’s joyously insubstantial stuff.

Unfolding across nine tracks and clocking in just a whisker over 19 minutes, the same could be said for I Used To Go To This Bar as a whole. From slump-shouldered love song Falling Into It and some brilliantly freewheeling acoustic guitar on Well, Whatever It Was, to the hazy, surging bittersweetness of the title-track and 50mph oddity The Opossum, there’s loads to love and nothing that sticks around long enough to hate. At two minutes and 42 seconds, All My Friends Are So Depressed is this record’s sprawling epic: a breezy indie-rock ode to infectious, self-indulgent melancholia.

Written and performed by a band well into their groove, and produced by Bad Religion legend-cum-Epitaph owner Brett Gurewitz, the finished product is finely balanced, tastefully under-polished and perfectly baked. Before you know it, penultimate track Well Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before? is nudging at you with its faintly self-referential observations about every day feeling exactly the same. Then heart-tugging closer Grey Guitar pushes over the finish line with deceptively profound slacker observations on the nature of memory and the importance of living in the moment. It’s a moreish listen, the perfect soundtrack to whiling away the days.

Rating: 4/5

For fans of: PUP, Turnover, The Menzingers

I Used To Go To This Bar is released on January 30 via Epitaph