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It is difficult to make lush pastoral pop like this without going completely overboard into schmalz territory, but this band manages quite well, carefully draping their orchestral tendencies over a solid base of interesting songs.
They hit hard and they hit fast, with half of the songs here clocking in at two minutes or less, but they also hit sweet, with layers of boy-girl harmonies and drizzles of horn section.
The Just Joans are the sonic equivalent of tartan… between the girl group influences, the pitch-perfect pastoral pop, and a sense of humor as black and bitter as truck stop coffee, they could not be more Scottish.
A return, and the word to use is "unabated." Their pummeling approach may seem to lack nuance, but it's not about how the punches are landing, it's about the pauses in between that make this measured approach to aggression particularly satisfying.
The guitar and bass strings are vibrating cosmically, the drums eat up the miles, an ethereal chorus swirls about. It's not a new formula, but it's done very well, and if you need to drive for sixty miles without noticing the time go by, here you go.
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