JOLLY: The Audio Guide To Happiness (ALTERNATIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

With a very successful first album and an approach to the original music, the New Yorkers of Jolly have seen their destiny take a new turn. The band's second album, Audio Guide to Happiness, is now part of Inside Out's catalog, and is the first part of a concept that will see an Audio Guide To Happiness Part II released very soon.

With their first album, Forty Six Minutes, Twelve Seconds Of Music, the Americans had impressed with their beautiful propensity to assert their style by feeding themselves with prestigious influences like Porcupine Tree. An additional dimension made the album even more intriguing. Jolly focused a part of its communication on the fact that the album was emitting binaural waves, a vector of happiness and inner peacefulness.

Looking at the title of this new album, we can see that the band has not abandoned this idea. On the contrary, Jolly rubs it in with an album divided into two phases which are as many stages towards a hedonistic path. The originality of the booklet lies in the fact that it already contains the lyrics of Audio Guide To Happiness Part II and that the four phases finally reunited will be the occasion of a therapy to follow, of an achievement. This materialist approach, which is in line with the sensualist theory, is very interesting and rare enough for a musician to be praised, but what about Jolly's music?

Audio Guide To Happiness is once again powerful and atmospheric. Within the same track, a certain joy (but always tinged with darkness) can cohabit with melodies and almost pop choruses and short but devastatingly powerful instrumental parts. One will recognize in "Pretty Darlin'" and "Where everything's Perfect" some colors of Demians or Riverside and in the fast "The Pattern" a Muse at the maximum of its power.

No track seems to stand out and although different atmospheres are proposed in this record, it remains very compact and of a great coherence. The harmonies of a Porcupine Tree ("Ends Where It Starts") go alongside with the lightness of mid-tempo ballads ("Storytime" and "Radiae") and a very modern atmospheric-electro mix ("Still A Dream").

Even if we have to wait for the second part of this concept to get a full idea of this work, we can already say that Jolly has not evolved much in its music and that the band remains in the groove already dug with 46:12. The quality is clearly there but the surprise effect tends to disappear. It is necessary to add that the formation has a true artistic signature and that the compositions prove it.

Audio Guide To Happiness is neither a disappointment nor a total delight but rather the beautiful confirmation of a talent. And they didn't need all this acoustico-physiologico-hedonist paraphernalia to spread pleasure, their music is more than enough. - Official website

JOLLY

THE AUDIO GUIDE TO HAPPINESS

INSIDEOUT MUSIC

ALTERNATIVE ROCK