Ghost Blonde

iTunes Review

If you look closely at the liner notes of No Joy’s debut album, you’ll find a familiar face behind the band’s mixing desk: Raveonettes frontman Sune Rose Wagner. Which makes perfect sense. After all, he’s spent the past decade perfecting a prickly noise-pop sound — caught somewhere between the fever dreams of Phil Spector and the jagged ‘80s jams of the Jesus and Mary Chain — and No Joy takes that approach to its next logical extreme. Much more than a simple case of shoegaze revivalism, Ghost Blonde is wrapped in barbed wire and full of restless reference points that range from electrical storms to the wildly expressive guitar work of Kevin Shields. Only much louder, with enough strange effects and fractured structures to make repeat listens all but mandatory. There’s really no way of understanding it all otherwise, as waves of distortion and pillows of smothered percussion do battle with what is otherwise quite beautiful. Maybe that’s why “Indigo Child” and “Pacific Pride” leave such a lasting impression — because they’re rare moments of actual restraint.