I came into this review knowing very little about Fleeting Joys. Apparently the Sacramento band's 2006 album, Despondent Transponder, had become a rare record, and was fetching big prices online. The record's now been reissued and I'm sure that certain portions of my readership will be happy to read that news.
The thing is, the band has drawn so heavily upon one record for inspiration that listening to Despondent Transponder only prompts a listener to think, "Why don't I just go and listen to Loveless? instead?" That's a fair question because tunes like "Lovely Crawl" and "I Want More Life" so slavishly attempt a recreation of My Bloody Valentine's sound circa 1991 that I really just don't see the appeal here except for the most hardcore devotees of the shoegaze sound. Where other groups -- Curve, Lilys, Medicine, among them -- took their cues from MBV, they also added elements to the sound, Fleeting Joys don't seem to be too interested in doing that. Sure, "The Breakup" and "Go and Come Back" have brief hints of other influences creeping in, but ultimately Fleeting Joys keep going back to the same well that's made up of the 1991 releases from Kevin Shields and company.
Despondent Transponder is not awful, but it's not original either. Not at all. Sure, "Where Do I End" and "Patron Saint" reveal the faintest hint of other records in the collection of these players, but the leap from Loop to MBV is not a huge one, you know what I mean? If you simply wished that Shields had offered up back then a second set of melodies using the sound of Loveless (1991), then this might be the album from you. For the rest of us, it seems a faintly robotic recreation of a genre that once meant the world to me, and which, however briefly, offered something revolutionary in sonic terms, and which, as of this 2006 release, has just been reduced to a set of pedal tricks and feedback washes designed to please latecomers to the form, or those who are just junkies for it.
Despondent Transponder is out now.
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