Too Much Joy – All These Fucking Feelings / All These Fucking Outtakes

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Formed in Scarsdale, New York in those heady days of the 1980’s, alternative rock band Too Much Joy never reaped the rewards of “success” as attained by their (let’s be frank, undeserving peers). They have, however, had an eventful career that found them tangling with everyone from the Secret Service to Bozo The Clown, while also spending the odd night in jail. Often characterised as “thinking man’s rock”, Too Much Joy’s sound is often cerebral and intellectual, yet it is also very accessible and their latest release All These Fucking Feelings (and its companion album All These Fucking Outtakes) inhabits the middle ground perfectly.

All These Fucking Feelings

Just like Devo and The Tubes, you get the feeling that Too Much Joy were conceived in college dormitories, (when the band members really should have been studying for their degrees) and that aesthetic soaks through almost every note of All These Fucking Feelings. There’s a whole lot of deconstruction going on here as the band pull apart popular culture and reassemble it in their own form. Take second track ‘What Pricks We Were’ for example, it sounds like a late-night TV ad for a truck festival aimed at beer-swilling hillbillies, which is perhaps the complete antithesis of Too Much Joy. Yet the band’s “genius” lies in never really knowing when they are serious, or not. They can be like the Robert Frost of alt rock; sometimes a song about meeting a ghost, really is about meeting a ghost, or it could be an irresistible punk tune, or it could be metaphorical bullshit. Anyhow, in whatever guise you accept Too Much Joy, there’s no denying the quality of their songwriting which turns the likes of ‘The Call Of The Void’ into divine pieces of ear candy. The most fun you can have with your clothes on? You decide.

All These Fucking Outtakes

I’m not sure what constitutes a Too Much Joy “outtake”, but as the title suggests, All These Fucking Outtakes contains a baker’s dozen. Housed in a sleeve that’s a monochrome negative of its parent album, this record isn’t quite an opposite, yet while All These Fucking Feelings flowed rather smoothly, this effort feels a tad more disjointed, a collection of tracks rather than a proper album, but that in no way negates its validity, and it’s still an enjoyable, rumbustious listen, and if Sham ‘69 had read Dostoevsky then the result would be something like ‘Better Than Being Alone’. Sometimes you can read too much (and sometimes too little) into the songs of Too Much Joy, and you have to concede that ‘Curse Of The Bobblehead’ is just a great, great, great song (with an equally stellar title). Evidencing a rich seam of songwriting, you get the feeling that many of these songs could have been carried over onto a full album, so take this record as a nice little bonus.

Music and lyrics which analyses itself and deconstructs its very being can sometimes seem a little too clever for its own good, yet these New Yorkers have hit a happy medium, which just shows you…you can never have Too Much Joy.

  • All These Fucking Feelings and All These Fucking Outtakes are released via Propeller Records and are available now (from here).
  • Official Website

Track List:

All These Fucking Feelings

  1. We Yell At 8
  2. What Pricks We Were
  3. Our History In Hugs
  4. Fortune Telling’s Easy
  5. Minister Of Loneliness
  6. Fucking Feelings
  7. Normal Never Was
  8. The Call Of The Void
  9. I Met A Ghost
  10. Mercy Mild
  11. Old Friends Make Me Sad
  12. Walken Dancing
  13. Slightly Beautiful

All These Fucking Outtakes

  1. What’s Good For The Banks
  2. Better Than Being Alone
  3. Curse Of The Bobblehead
  4. Just Jen
  5. Nothing Like You
  6. My Future Ex-Wife
  7. She Took It As A Sign
  8. Killer The Bichon Frise
  9. Idiots In Paradise
  10. Dick Punching Foe Of The Patriarchy
  11. As Quiet As God
  12. The Song I Didn’t Write
  13. The Otter’s Return