Originally intended for release in 2018, the second album from the short-lived Philadelphia-via-Albany DIY band is a pristine time capsule powered by lo-fi ingenuity.
Jouska existed in the space between greatness and legend that breeds the truly definitive bands of an era: those that aren’t quite transcendent, but memorable enough to serve as shorthand. The Albany group’s story is a familiar one for emo-adjacent DIY artists during the mid-2010s: Upstart band in burgeoning local scene attracts national attention, signs to a respected label, and moves to Philly, generating momentum that soon stalls on side projects, life commitments, and a pandemic. A new album that’s actually quite old, Visions From the Bridge brings Jouska back into conversation by confirming their four-year silence as a permanent hiatus. Dated December 2018 and quietly dropped on Bandcamp several weeks ago, it serves as a bittersweet relic of a promising band and a reminder that talent doesn’t always reach its full potential.
Then again, the appeal of Jouska’s music lay in its constant threat of collapse. Reminiscent of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s unruly and unpredictable post-rock, The Glow Pt. 2’s mercurial naturalism, and LVL UP’s cashed-bowl cosmology, Jouska’s debut Topiary arrived in autumn 2016, when the leading lights of emo’s revival were starting to recede, outshined by more immediate weed’n’meme and alt-country strains of the genre. Topiary’s rickety production left much to the imagination, though an eventual re-release on Tiny Engines proved the duct tape and bubble gum holding it together was load-bearing; the album’s immersive spell was broken by an altered and inferior track sequencing that facilitated its pressing to vinyl. The 2018 EP From Elson to Emmett was both more ambitious and antagonistic than its predecessor, its cleaner sound contrasting with pricklier melodies and complicated song structures; it was a weighty and presumably transitional work.
Had it been released a few months after Emmett, as originally intended, Visions From the Bridge is where it all could’ve come into focus. Jouska had taken their vision to the most forbidding outskirts of post-rock and returned seeking the simple pleasures of following a single, propulsive groove, carrying a verse into a chorus, and clocking out in less than three minutes. The sound of guitar-oriented indie rock hasn’t shifted enough for Visions From the Bridge to sound dated, though it serves as a pristine time capsule of “Philly indie rock in 2018”: a distinctly American and extroverted form of shoegaze, heavy on the low end, with analog trickery attesting to the gravitational pull of Alex G and Spirit of the Beehive on out-of-towners.
Whereas Jouska once compartmentalized their influences, Visions From the Bridge coalesces into browned-out psychedelia, bad vibes without the passivity. Doug Dulgarian’s vocals are usually battered by harsh, trebly reverb, an effect that emphasizes an unmistakable and constant struggle rare in this style of music; his images are borne of gravel, dirty water, chloroform, and cancer. “Fall asleep with my teeth clenched,” he shouts under plush weighted blankets of distortion on “Exit Spell,” capturing the persistent stalemate between depressive paralysis and anxiety. The extraterrestrial, pitch-shifted vocals on “Humming” provide the album’s most beautiful and most unnerving sound, like if My Bloody Valentine spent their post-Loveless hiatus getting stoned and watching The X-Files.
In moments like these, Visions From the Bridge pointed forward, recapturing the boundless creativity and lo-fi ingenuity that powered Topiary with newfound concision. But the lengthier numbers that close out side B lie in a netherworld between these two qualities, their sights set on “epic” but abandoned about 80 percent of the way through. It’s an anticlimactic and revealing end to Visions From the Bridge, an album with enough exciting ideas to get Jouska started, though maybe not quite enough to carry them to the next level. As Dulgarian’s current project They Are Gutting a Body of Water gears up to release a split and a second album, Visions From the Bridge provides closure: Jouska’s story might have come to a quicker and quieter end than expected, but it’s likely part of a bigger one to come.
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