Peanut Butter

The Welsh quintet's second release goes down as easy as a mixtape on a '90s spring day. [No. 121, p.57]

Peanut Butter is an accomplished, confident and mature approach to a type of music indebted to teenage energy, a record that veers between styles of music that are often at odds with one another without ever feeling indecisive or confused.

With ten ridiculously infectious songs clocking in at just 22 minutes, Joanna Gruesome are in no danger of wearing out their welcome.

Based on Weird Sister, Joanna Gruesome didn't seem like the kind of band to bow to pressure or to fall down on the job. The intense and quite wonderful Peanut Butter is bracing proof of that fact.

These days lots of different bands/songs are called noise pop, but these folks are doing it right.

Joanna Gruesome have adapted, honed and stretched their sound on Peanut Butter, and though nothing here sticks in the brain quite like ‘Sugarcrush’ or ‘Secret Surprise’, their tip as one of Britain’s brightest new hopes is more than backed up on this showing.

Ebullient, thundering and made with unabashedly 90s vigour.

The band is tighter, more focused, and have honed their sound ever more slightly, tossing in snippets of texture and becoming even leaner.

Short, but invigoratingly sweet. [Jun 2015, p.77]

Peanut Butter sees Joanna Gruesome relishing the power of refusal, bending the tropes of macho rock and relationships to their own twisted whims.

Peanut Butter’s 10 songs fizz by in no time at all. A livid onslaught of pop suss.

Taken in one full burst, Peanut Butter succeeds as a rousing and frenetic call to arms, built on the back of sunny harmonies and squealing distortion. It’s not the best record of the year, but it might be the most efficient.

Peanut Butter is a chaotic listen, powerful in parts and fragile in others, and often both at the same time. No matter where it goes, it's always running away from itself.

The music is bold, intelligent, and quirky--maybe a little too quirky, but that’s up for debate. If Peanut Butter has a fault, it’s too much consistency.

Peanut Butter is one of the thousands of daring, whimsical, uneven results already here and still yet to be created from it.

Peanut Butter is far more self-aware, and that leads to music with greater resonance and variety.

"There Is No Function Stacy," just one of the gems on Joanna Gruesome's fantastic racket of a second album.

Peanut Butter manages to double down on Weird Sister's considerable volume of bitter pills and sugar-encrusted euphoria. [Apr-May 2015, p.83]

A sameness runs from track to track--brisk tempos, mid-range key, the loud/soft thing--but if you take time to work out the lyrics, you'll be rewarded with intriguing surrealism, goofy fun (no surprise considering their band name) and, on incendiary pop-punk Psykick Espionage, a welcome dose of badassery.

Their second album is a bittersweet indie-punk chaser. [Jun 2015, p.96]

It’s certainly one of the edgier twee recordings in recent years, almost an oxymoron in itself, one that falls short on its promise to channel its internal chaos with sprightly reminiscence.

Part of the difficulty with this is, simply, that--taken as a body of work (album) rather than a collection of individual tracks--interest can start to wane. This isn’t helped, either, by the chiefly indistinguishable lyrics: that character-and light/shade-drenched vocal might be enormously listenable, but for most of the time we aren’t able to make out what it is articulating.

The songs occasionally thrill but tonally it all becomes just a trifle exhausting about halfway through. [Jun 2015, p.107]

Joanna Gruesome rides on raw emotion, whether it stems from anger or victory, but they lose the edge of their retorts.

Producer MJ (of Hookworms fame) and the band intended to strip things back and become more economical with their sound. While they certainly have achieved this, in this instance it has arguably starved the songs and disallowed them the space to breathe.