Best tunes of 2020: #8 No Joy “Birthmark”

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It’s been just shy of four months since we last visited this series counting down my favourite tunes of 2020.

I don’t know that I’ve stayed away on purpose. I do have a few series on the go and the usual end of year festivities often take up lots of blog space. However, I admit that I’ve been finding 2020 an odd year to look back upon of late. Sure there was lots of great music being produced with all these musicians locked up with nothing else to do, but the rest of us were also locked up. It often feels like a lost year* and I’m sure I’m not alone with this feeling.

Indeed, every time I sat down to write this post, I found myself getting distracted by something else. Most recently, I went down the rabbit hole of looking at the timelines and the numbers of the COVID pandemic and it brought it all back. It’s perhaps easy to forget how bad things looked early on and all the fear and uncertainty. The numbers of the rates of infection, how quickly things spread, and how many deaths there were early on. Faced with the stats, it made me think how bad things could have gotten if it weren’t for the measures taken and for the mass roll outs of the vaccines worldwide. I remembered the empty grocery shelves, the low gas prices, the almost daily trips to Costco in search of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. The stories of resilience, human nature winning out, images of deserted streets of some of the world’s biggest cities, and that video of Italian seniors singing together from the windows of each of their homes.

That last reminded me about all the stories coming out of the seniors facilities during the lockdowns. Hearing how the virus ran rampant through each of them, despite the valiant efforts of staff. How it hit certain residents hard, given their age and in some cases, already poor health, how the mortality rate was even higher. How the isolation made things even harder for loved ones to check in on family members in these homes. The word was that some were terribly frightened, remembering the previous pandemic of their youth, and some were not really understanding what was going on and feeling abandoned. And though I’m sure things are quite different and much improved in these facilities nowadays, I met and spoke to a few seniors when I was in the hospital last year and heard some stories and got a different perspective. Imagine, preferring to stay in the hospital than to return to your ‘home’.

Which brings me back to the real subject of today’s post. “Birthmark”, the number eight song on this list of my favourite tunes from 2020, was actually inspired by Jasamine White-Gluz, frontwoman and driving force behind Montreal’s No Joy, visiting a relative in senior living facility a few years before the pandemic. It’s not a protest song or a call to arms for seniors rights but it does shine a light on their humanity.

“Oh I braid your veins
Our old limbs are hard to break
No Matter when
Every lung has a line to trace”

As I wrote when No Joy’s fourth long player hit number four on my Best albums list at the end of 2020, the “opening track on the album and very first peek at the project’s first new album in five years hits like a ton of bricks. It’s the sound of 90s shoegaze gone 90s alternative dance. Think Chapterhouse’s second album “Blood music” or anything by Curve. Like the rest of the album, Jasamine White-Gluz had a lot of fun with this one in the studio, finding use for a set of bongos and apparently, a broken clarinet. The bongos are definitely front and centre and form the basis of a dance floor beckoning drum rhythm but I challenge you to point out the clarinet in the wall of sound she’s created in the loops and loops and loops.”