"See How Tame I Can Be!"
Joyce Manor
from Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired
2012
Let's all raise our glasses to the bands who aren't afraid to create a short album. Speaking as someone who came up through the years of '90s excess, an exuberance bred from the chosen medium's ability to fit 80 minutes on a single CD and artists' desire to fill every single minute, even if the quality didn't match the quantity. It's refreshing to find an artist who releases albums at a nice steady clip and who isn't afraid to say something like "This is only fifteen minutes worth of music, but it's our best fifteen minutes."
Joyce Manor is one of those bands. I've been working my way backwards through their discography ever since falling for their most recent, 2018's Million Dollars to Kill Me (which is interesting in itself, going in reverse and hearing a band become more and more lo-fi). It's not a tall task—their five albums cover all of 88 minutes total. The album I'm listening to now, Of All Thing I Will Soon Grow Tired, runs a scant thirteen, and I've listened to it almost twice in the time it took me to type all this.
Even at such short lengths, they still manage to find plenty of ways to surprise and delight. Joyce Manor is of the emo/pop-punk variety, like something Blink-182 would make after listening to American Football once. "See How Tame I Can Be!," at 90 seconds, is in and out, and is kinda fuzzy, but its bouncing bass and its stuttering rhythm is both emo and punk in ways that I will always love.
And it's so fucking short. I love that I can listen to a great album four times in a single hour. I wish more bands took this road. There are weeks these days when I feel like I don't really have much time to do anything, let alone invest in a bloated 90-minute rock opera. Just give me a short album that I can hit as quickly as possible before Willow starts whining that she wants to watch Madagascar 2: Return to Africa.
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