A-F Records, April 21, 2020
Devon Kay & The Solutions bring the pop goodness to “Limited Joy”.
Devon Kay & The Solutions have been around for awhile, releasing music dating back to 2011. However, I didn’t hear of them until I got into Devon Kay’s other band, Direct Hit! sometime around the Brainless God record. Where Direct Hit! were no strangers to pushing back at convention, merging pop punk sugar and hardcore yells and intensity, Devon Kay & The Solutions have been even more all over the place, blending high energy pop punk with ska and new wave and power pop to pretty good effect. On Limited Joy, they do that some more.
My favorite stuff on Limited Joy has hooks for days, so saccharine as to pretty much render any labels beyond “pop” as superfluous. For instance, opener “Oh Glorious Nothing” digs into a cool power pop groove, flashing in some awesome guitar lead and some horns as accents while clear and unadorned vocals carry a memorable cadence and a contagious melody. “Anything At All” is similar, with some nice keys and great horns (really love the trumpet on this one) and a fun back-and-forth between pop goodness and pummeling aggression that would easily fit onto a Direct Hit! record. “One Horse” pulls a sort of 80’s new wave thing into a slow catchy stomp with lots of keys and effects and horns and somehow ends up reminding me of The Hold Steady (it must be the structure, pacing, and melody, because the other ingredients don’t sound anything alike). From the synth accents on “My Neck Is Tired From Holding My Head Up” to the power pop hooks of “Evermore”, and from the crazy cool Van Halen guitar lead on “In A Prairie State” to the acoustic guitar and tumbling melody of “Risk-Reward”, the record tries on different hats, but the songs are consistently pop and consistently good.
The lyrics on Limited Joy seem to revel in ideas of being alone, searching for connection, and a sort of resigned nihilism. “Keep Dreaming” is a spot on example of the anxiety Devon Kay gets at with lines like “breathe some more, you’re not ok, can’t try again another day” and “eat sleep and destroy, rebuild when you feel like it, accept that you have limited joy”. Elsewhere, “252 Brighton Ave” wallows in longing, “yearning” for a Boston that he’s “never called home” and “Risk-Reward” does a similar thing, wondering if there’s “life without love”. And on both “Oh Glorious Nothing” and “My Neck Is Tired”, Kay fears ending up “in the nothingness alone” (“Glorious”) and begs to feel “something” (“Neck”) and “anything” (“Glorious”), respectively. That anxious want for connection is really palpable throughout much of Limited Joy and seems at once consistent with the music of Devon Kay’s past and perfectly reflective of our current state.
Limited Joy is a really fun release with a bunch of great songs and hooks that’ll keep you coming back and singing at the top of your lungs. The music is high-energy and fun and the words are thought-provoking and connecting throughout. I’m into this a lot.
You might like this if:
- You like good and peculiar pop songs and intriguing words
You might not if:
- The idea of idiosyncratic pop music makes you throw up a little in your mouth
ryan is a reviewer and news editor for TGEFM. He’s very secretive, he might be an alien.
