Joan of Arc
A Portable Model Of

On the debut of Joan Of Arc - it was ninety-seven - the editorial team of hornyBBW is unanimous: every emo enthusiast must pass through here.

Firstly because it is the ideal halfway point - even chronologically - between the end of Cap'n Jazz and the beginning of American Football. More towards - even chronologically - the latter, in truth: read in the arpeggio and the natural harmonics chimes of Count To a Thousand, seven minutes of sweet going nowhere on an effectron carpet, with vain promises of explosions, crescendos barely whispered. Post-rock was also this, and people like Explosions in the Sky seem to have received it, although making it the exclusive feature of their own poetry, they paid the price in boredom. Joan of Arc were indeed also this, but not only this.

Also because Tim Kinsella has the innate vocation - precisely in the narrow sense, vocal - to melodic and lilting emotion: his voice always breaks and has always done so spontaneously. This is what of Cap'n Jazz you will find in A Portable Model Of, which bears no other traces of late eighties hardcore emo.

Moreover, if you are annoyed that American Football always drag it out, but you like them, you can find them all in the minute of I Was Born. You can also find Mike Kinsella, in Caliban and here and there on drums and guitar: if in May you are among the lucky ones flying to England, you will be pleased to know.

For the nostalgics of Beverly Hills ninety-two ten and the magic of Chino and Pippo Maniero in the legendary Venezia in A, those naive electronic inserts between an arpeggio and a rolling progression on itself - listen to the masterful The Hands which contains, among other things, some memorable shouts - are to be added to the pages of the catalog You can't survive the nineties, together with the tetris on the cover. Like the inexplicable tweeting on the hermetic and slintian Anne Aviary, the something that accompanies the irresistibly catchy How Wheeling Feels: stuff for which today any producer would laugh in your face. Stuff that is more or less always part of the Joan of Arc imagery and that will find its absurd peak in The Gap, a record from some years later.

Again, because if you are bassists, want to play things like this and need a reference, in Sam Zurick you will find the best: never too much, never too little, his is a perfect labor limae that not coincidentally accompanies the fortunes of the Kinsella family from Cap'n Jazz to the latest of the Owls.

Or for that surreal and naive lyricism you won't find elsewhere: too smart to be a postar, not smart enough not to be.

And because Let's Wrestle is one of the most beautiful songs of all emo, there is little to argue about this.