Vance Joy, the triumph (or triumph) of bland joy | Culture
Preparations for adult life. Any boy or girl around thirty and a half would feel terribly old and dark on Thursday night in Madrid's Kapital room, where the common audience will have passed only once or twice by police station to renew the DNI. That's the way things are when someone who debuts on a Spanish stage is Vance Joy, a very popular newcomer or perfectly unknown depending on whether the query is raised to your niece or the nephew's parents.
Let's clarify that Joy-Joy as artistic surname, beyond the original Keogh is bad to memorize-militates between millenials almost by the hair (curly), since a kid from 1987 still flirted with Messenger before the Tinder. But that cherubic approach to the song of the author, that snowy smile that shines from the deepest recesses of Instagram, are ideal for the age of innocence. Those years in which all the idols are adorable until others, perhaps even more smiling, erased them from memory.
Vance is handsome, ebullient, cordial and trickster, if for that reason we should translate his efforts to extol the siesta as the great Spanish contribution to international culture. And it is, let's be clear, a good musician. Put us Happy Together (The Turtles) at full speed so that we were tuning into the waves of bliss before breaking into complete solitude, without fuss or hesitation, with Call if You Need Me, a preclear sample of its solvency with the arpeggio and the firmness of a throat that will end up jumping without troubles to the superior octave. The problem comes with the discouraging feeling that we could predict each coming chord with a small margin of error, that the correction in the forms comes from a trova concept like mass production.
It makes me angry that this is so, because the photogenic young man from Melbourne can suggest us an Ed Sheeran with less ginger in the hair or a Passenger in a hairless version, and such references are not bad; even more so if we think that by sharing a generation gap with the reguetones, the tanganas, the electrolatin and other torments of legal tender, everything could get worse. Even the Australian gives the pleasant surprise of his metal duo, as if he wanted to adapt in tiny to the universe of Mumford & Sons. But in the end everything turns out to be tabulated. There are no meanders, wrinkles, swings; only the drum of the battery dialing a four by four with a dry and undisturbed blow.
Above the average is Georgia and that arpeggio development that, putting a little good will, can refer us to the sweet times of Tracy Chapman. Or the version of All Night Long, of Lionel Ritchie, to which the acoustic bearing gives him a lot of grace. The bad thing is that in these cases the irruption of the ukulele is always only a matter of time. The Hawaiian connection ends up materializing on the occasion of Saturday Sun, which, of course, has nothing to do with Nick Drake. Well thought out and, for what could happen, almost better.
For the final traca left the two main dishes: Lay it On Me, which is really good (although it shares harmonic and rhythmic codes with Stolen Dance, by Milky Chance) and Riptide, that initiatory success that served to demolish walls and dynamit the counters of digital eavesdropping, not far from the 1,000 million. Does this Idol Joy have something to triumphs, neat and talented budding budding. Pity that the joy is so sosainas on your lips. As much as for the 63 minutes of his first Spanish concert were the best news of the night.
