Too Much Joy was a punky power pop quartet with a sense of humor. Lead singer Tim Quirk wrote wonderfully witty lyrics and was able to touch upon young adulthood as well as the best in the field. The band had the unique ability to sound loose while in fact being a rather tight outfit thanks to the crack rhythm section of bassist Sandy Smallens and drummer Tommy Vinton. They had an-almost MTV hit with "That's A Lie" (a rap-to-rock cover of the LL Cool J song) and a few hit singles on Billboard Modern Rock Tracks in "Donna Everywhere" and "Crush Story" (the latter of which deserved to be significantly more well-known than it ultimately became).
TMJ relaxing on the set of the "That's A Lie" music video
Too Much Joy was dropped by Giant in the Autumn of 1993 after
the Forever In Your Face Tour and this was released during the big dry-period following the 1992 album Mutiny and preceding ...finally in 1996. This was issued by the official TMJ fanclub
newsletter Joybuzzer in the Summer of 1994. It was offered to both new-subscribers and renewing-members, which was a pretty sweet deal. Joybuzzer was run by Clive Young and was all-around excellent zine. "Just Around The Bend" sounds
like a great lost early 90's TMJ single. "Never Work" is good but isn't done much
justice by the soundcheck recording. "Hey Merlin" has cool would-be psychedelic
lyrics but suffers from a clumsy arrangement (or perhaps that was just the performance). "Outtakes" for this EP are
"Death Ray Machine" (later on Gods & Sods) and the great "Sunroof"
(a Gods & Sods download-only bonus track via eMusic).
This blue 7" vinyl EP (at 33 1/3RPM) is pretty rare. It was a limited pressing of 500 or 1,000 copies. It was mastered directly from DAT to vinyl. Only "Hey Merlin" has since appeared in a digital format on Gods & Sods, but all three-tracks are available for a very inexpensive download from toomuchjoy.com. If you can find this nifty release, by all means, pick it up.
Here's the video review:
Special thanks to: Clive Young of Pro Sound News and Joybuzzer Zine.
Scarsdale, New York's Too Much Joy are perhaps one of my all-time favorite bands. They were most certainly my favorite 90's band (they existed in the public eye from 1987 - 1997). Having said this, it's not so difficult to retain all objectivity when discussing them anymore (or other favorite artists of mine). If I were still a teen, which I haven't been for a few years, this would be a completely different story. My enthusiasm for the band was sincere, as they were all but updated hybrids of various favorite bands of mine. Namely The Replacements, but there were elements of Cheap Trick meets The Clash and The Who meets The Raspberries as well, here and there.
There was a subversive element where the vocals were concerned. They approached their backing vocals as maybe The Beach Boys filtered through the Beastie Boys, but they were a guitar-based proto-pop-punk quartet. Or just a punk-y power pop band. Their lead singer/lyricist Tim Quirk had a fairly unconventional voice. It's pretty obvious Lou Reed was a template for him. Or at least it was an excuse to talk-sing his vocals, some of the time (this is probably most obvious on the band's debut album Green Aggs And Crack). Guitarist Jay Blumenfield had the best voice in the bunch and could hold his own with either R.E.M. jangle or Clash-infused barre chords. Sandy Smallens was a dexterous bassist and whose over-emoted vocals acted as a perfect foil the sweet vocals of Blumenfield and talkier vocals of Quirk. Now-retired NYPD Sergeant drummer Tommy Vinton was basically modern-rock's answer to Keith Moon. Instrumentally, he's possibly the finest in Too Much Joy. He could play small, understated parts and loud, overstated ones with equal skill.
When I heard Too Much Joy for the first time it was in my friend, the late-Eddie Byrne's living room. On the stereo we had on WDRE 92.7 FM in the Summer of 1991. "Long Haired Guys From England" came on, and it was a complete breath of fresh air from what seemed like a stagnant programming-time on my favorite station. The song was four chords (A-E-G-D) repeated for two-minutes and forty-five seconds. It was loud, catchy, memorable, clever and funny. It sounded like it was going to go off the rails toward the end, yet somehow gained momentum and ended no sooner than it began. However, the song segued into a stream of commercials and there was no mention of the artist's name when the D.J. returned to announce the next block of songs. Regardless, I loved it.
And then I forgot about it for about a year, until bonafide Too Much Joy fan and fellow alternative music lover Doug Mashkow loaned me Too Much Joy's third album Cereal Killers (along with their second, SonOf Sam I Am). For some reason Cereal Killers was a difficult listen at first - I initially found there to be too much separation between the vocals and the music, why is the lead singer singing...like that? What was up with these synthesized glockenspiels? I returned to the album a day or so later. Eventually, the fourteen songs on Cereal Killers sunk their subversive power pop/pop-punk metaphoric teeth in. The lyrics were plainly brilliant, the music was well-written and executed and the band was basically a pop juggernaut.
The songs are basically in something of a loose-thematic cycle. When analyzing/dissecting the album, S. Scott Lessig's apt description in Issue Six of Joybuzzer is "Loneliness leads to alienation (which) leads to rage". He basically sums up the entire album with that one sentence. I'd have to add "Resignation" to that description as well. The alienation in the songs, "Pirate", "Goodbye Ohio" & "William Holden Caulfield" also contain the element of rage. In fact, you could easily make a pie chart with which songs fall into which part of the pie (alienation/resignation/loneliness/rage), and have a ridiculous amount of overlap. It was fairly unique at the time - recorded in the Summer of 1990, released in the Spring of 1991 - for an album this dark to have such a pop sheen. Having said this, for the listeners who wanted to wade in the shallower waters of the material; there are plenty of references to getting drunk, getting stoned, and having sex.
Produced by Paul Fox, who also produced XTC's Oranges & Lemons, Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians' Perspex Island and They Might Be Giants' John Henry, the album was a critical success. Its' only flirtation with the charts was the power pop single "Crush Story" (which also stealthily recycles the same chords from "Long Haired Guys From England" for the verses) peaking at #17 on Billboard's Modern Rock Charts. It also contained the Replacements-like single "Susquehanna Hat Company", the somewhat true-story "Thanksgiving In Reno", the frat-rock classic "King Of Beers", the completely-in-denial "Nothing On My Mind" and the bands' very own "Theme Song".
Side One Dummy Records has done vinyl-loving TMJ fans the service of reissuing the album on vinyl. Its' only initial vinyl release was in Germany which awkwardly contained the 1990 single "That's A Lie" from SonOf Sam I Am. It is a limited pressing of 500 yellow and 500 blue copies. The release contains newly-penned and plenty revealing liner notes from Tim Quirk. Some orders made through www.sideonedummy.com will contain a brand new issue of Too Much Joy's Official Fanzine Joybuzzer. Side One Dummy did a really nice job with the release - the vinyl looks really nice and the record sounds beautiful. The packaging is faithful to the artwork of original release. Hopefully Side One Dummy will one day release the band's follow-up album Mutiny as well (which would be making its debut on vinyl, if they did).
Highly Recommended for fans of snarky modern rock (the then-term for such bands), pop-punk and power pop alike.
Here's my video review of the album:
Special thanks to Clive Young (for the nice blue vinyl), Joybuzzer Zine and Doug Mashkow at CD Island (for the informal introduction to the world of Too Much Joy).
