Joan Of Arc 1984

Over their 20-odd year discography, Joan of Arc's astute, endlessly probing musical
experimentation has been chorused by a barrage of voices, mostly from the singular
larynx of mainstay Tim Kinsella. Richard Brautigan, Mark Twain, Elizabeth Taylor, and
Assata Shakur might visit his lyrics, but it's the band itself that contains multitudes.
Ever since Joan of Arc's most recent lineup_ Kinsella, Theo Katsaounis, Melina
Ausikaitis, Bobby Burg, and Jeremy Boyle_began playing shows together in 2015, fans
have witnessed an even more radical democracy at work. Live, old jams and new
tracks have often melted and mutated, members jumping from instrument to
instrument in between or in the middle of songs, all stasis discarded. And now, a
series of nearly a cappella performances from Kinsella's fellow vocalist Melina
Ausikaitis, debuted live by Joan of Arc over the last several years, has become the
backbone of their new LP, 1984. Thoroughly of the band's lineage, Ausikaitis' lyrics
are equally measured with wit, despair and stubborn perseverance. Like the album's
striking hand drawn cover art, the music inside is often spare; anthemic highs ring
from elegiac lows and back again. At times, Ausikaitis sings in an earnestly tangy and
lovely flat twang redolent of the midwest, before screwing her voice up into a
fearsome roar. Sometimes her voice is electronically distorted, like bells in the sky,
into ringing eternity. Remarkably, so much of the cluttered sound of earlier Joan of
Arc LPs has largely fallen away on 1984, as has Kinsella's voice. At first it's genuinely
shocking. But the songs here are a revelation, as profound and plainspoken as
parables.