Album Review

If you imagined a side project from a member of The Strokes, it probably wouldn’t have sounded anything like Little Joy. Freed from the somewhat constraining Strokes sound, you might have expected a band member to foray into hard rock. Or maybe someone would have tried to explore the dancier aspects of the New Wave lurking at the edges of the group’s sound.

But Strokes’ drummer Fabrizio Moretti chooses a far more eclectic path on Little Joy. Maybe he was influenced by the company he kept for the project: Brazilian singer/guitarist Rodrigo Amarante, famous in his native country for his work with the group Los Hermanos, and multi-instrumentalist/singer Binki Shapiro. What Little Joy ends up producing is a sound that’s alluringly hard to pin down.

Considering the international flavor of the band, it’s not surprising that a world-pop aesthetic shows up at times, most notably on album opener “The Next Time Around,” which sounds like a less-snarky Vampire Weekend, and “No One’s Better Sake,” flavored by ska-like organ and bass. But even those more overt influences quickly fade in the face of Little Joy’s most consistent characteristic: catchy choruses featuring captivating, woozy background vocals and harmonies.

Listen to “The Next Time Around”
Listen to “No One’s Better Sake”

Amarante takes most of the lead vocals, and the melancholic nature of his voice sets the tone for the whole album, with lyrics that often dwell on fading love affairs or doomed relationships. Typical of this is “With Strangers,” in which the singer despairs over the quality of the shoddy replacements compared to his true love: “If only you, if only now.”

Listen to “With Strangers”

But Little Joy is not a downer by any stretch. There’s a gentleness and resignation in the music with lyrics that are quietly moving. Many songs have sparse instrumentation, with the empty spaces often filled in by that unique vocal blend. Let’s give credit here to Shapiro as well, who does an excellent job on her lead vocals, especially on the country-ish “Don’t Watch Me Dancing,” and on her ethereal support of Amarante all throughout the album.

Listen to “Don’t Watch Me Dancing”

The pervading softness is such that when the electric guitars and drums pop out on “Keep Me In Mind,” the song that sounds most like Moretti’s day job, it’s almost jarring. The upbeat material tends to swing instead of rock, most memorably so on the jovial “Brand New Start,” which rides a rockabilly groove into a triumphant horn-filled chorus. The simple joy of Moretti’s lyrics (“There ain’t no lover like the one I got/She and I and a brand new start”) can’t be denied.

Listen to “Keep Me In Mind”
Listen to “Brand New Start”

On “How To Hang A Warhol,” Amarante sings a bouncy tune relating an artist’s struggle to produce a masterpiece. Fab Moretti’s regular band can relate, having failed to produce anything to match their revelatory debut, Is This It. But, based on Little Joy, you get the feeling that his side project could produce gentle gems like this one each and every time out of the box.

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