No Joy ~ Flowers for the Dead ~ Labrador

Clearly sympatico at the time of collaborating, No Joy (Jasamine White-Gluz) and Fire-Toolz had both resituated to secluded woodsy milieus prior to the “Bugland seshies”, as I now name the historic pairing. Together, they created an aural equivalent of a late 1980 I-d magazine front and back cover, with a non-problematic National Geographic hiding within. Fire-Toolz sums it up: “The collaboration really felt limitless. I didn't have to adhere to a certain vision in a way that made me feel like I couldn't be Fire-Toolz. I could easily relate to this album because Jasamine and I liked a lot of the same music, and I was able to be creative in ways that were freeing as if I was making my own album. “


Both spent days driving through on empty rural highways listening to the mixes, and it reflects in the final product. With an open ear, many “influence eggs” can be detected by the listener. Garbage Dream House is Zooropian without any of U2’s ego baggage. Seven-minute closing track Jelly Meadow Bright even manages to meld Stooges’ Fun House out of control saxophone with the chill buoyancy of a high-end spa. Touching on respected, familiar genres and sounds while attempting to advance one’s own isn’t easy but Bugland manages to. What genre is it anyway? Is it even shoegaze when it could live happily on a shelf next to Boards of Canada and Autechre? The right answer is ‘yes’. What a lovely shelf ‘twould be as well. A marble shelf, with cyberpunk elements. Bugland‘s a testament to White-Gluz’s evolution and her ability to channel a wide variety of tastes into something cohesive that can descend into fine-tuned chaos, then out of that chaos with ease.

9 songs, 30 minutes.
The sort of lean, sharp pop music that you get from a steady diet of Motown, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival. The short-story wit of Paul Weller, Smokey Robinson, Nick Lowe. Labrador’s My Version Of Desire is that rarest of modern marvels: an impeccably crafted sonic story collection as replete with hooks as it is heartfelt insights into our todays and yesterdays. Guitars chime and fizz in the power pop tradition; choruses burst in technicolor, memorized before they’re even over. You sit down with My Version Of Desire — or you drive with it, let it guide you to the bus stop or the corner store — and hear the tangles of life pulled at like snarled-up guitar cables. It’s an album that’s lived-in and lived-with.

Led by guitarist, singer, and songwriter Pat King, Labrador has been around for a handful of years — seen moves to a new city (Philadelphia), seen a handful of lineup changes (the band is now officially King, Will Hochgertel and Steve Kurtz), and an excellent full-length breakthrough in 2023’s Hold The Door For Strangers. As you might guess from the title, Strangers was an album about empathy, full of poignant character studies and patient witching-hour ruminations.

Consider My Version Of Desire the big, beating heart to that earlier album’s busy, roving thoughts. The songs this time around turn inward, lessons in love and acceptance and mercy, via the lens of how we might learn to love and accept and forgive ourselves. The beauty here is that these self-portraits are delivered with so much dynamism, so much electricity. Confessionals set to mid-60s confections. “Dry Out In June” is a song about sobriety delivered with the excitable pop charge of Small Faces or My Aim Is True-era Elvis Costello, roaring like a mid-80s Replacements single beneath a corona of soda-pop electric organ. “Someday I’ll Pay” stomps and blooms in the key of Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, guilt and trauma wrestled with in a major key. “Heavy Hearts” has both Nashville and Memphis in its wall of twanging Les Pauls, Stax hooks, and widescreen harmonies (“I’ve got a heeeaaavy heart”).

More often than not these songs start loud and get louder (credit engineer/mixer Heather Jones and mastering engineer Chris Walla for their brilliant work in helping make these pocket symphonies burst). King and company get down to the tough stuff of figuring yourself out, but the warmth here, the melodies and energy and ebullient blend of alt-country and mod-soul, always frame that soul-searching as a thing of beauty. My Version Of Desire — a true masterpiece -- is an album about love in all of the complexity that the word, in its truest depth, underlines. It’s a real kindness offered to all of us that Pat King and Labrador trace the rocky garden paths we have to take with such a joy for living, and with such a keen sense for the beauty of the flowers.

- Chad Jewett, Perennial
Winter 2025