Too Much Joy

Facing feelings, cursing feelings, shouting feelings over propulsive drums and unreasonably loud guitars, sneaking feelings into singalongs so gum-in-hair sticky that it might take a couple choruses before the people singing along realize they’re singing something raw and resonant and true: this has been the Too Much Joy approach for decades. Here’s a band that got ‘90s crowds to shout “La-la-la-la-la-la lonely,” pandemic-era streamers to belt “Men like Uncle Watson / will destroy us in the end,” and now All These Fucking Feelings listeners to holler “Talking about what pricks we were / and how much better we wanted to be.” Who knows whether they were pricks or not. What matters is that the four suburban New York kids who played Clash covers at school dances in 1980 have kept at it ever since. Along the way they’ve grown into an international five piece, after dragooning British pop savant (and producer of brash fourth album, Mutiny) William Wittman into the band. Drummer Tommy Vinton’s headlong rhythms have always been as crucial to Too Much Joy as singer/lyricist/mensch Tim Quirk’s incisive words and Jay Blumenfield’s raucous guitar. All These Fucking Feelings finds Vinton and bassists Sandy Smallens and Wittman in peak form on the swaggering “Minister of Loneliness,” a post-punk powerhouse that boasts throat-shredding shouts, or “Our History in Hugs,” a 3-minute na-na-na relationship history digging into love and loss over an irresistible Archies stomp. –Alan Scherstuhl