Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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I Can't Stand it Here on Quiet Night (test Pressing - signed by Janine Rainforth)
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
This is one of 2 test pressings from Optimal of the seminal release I Can't Stand it Here On Quiet Night - released in 2017 on Silent Street Records. It will be dispatched with a hard copy of the front artwork and the sleeve notes and signed by Janine Rainforth. Each test pressing consists of 2 vinyl discs.
Reviews:
Janine Rainforth’s vocals never sounded better than on this beguiling ode to the quiet hours between the hurried pace of city life, floating out atop dubby bass, off-key piano stabs and straining brass. Elsewhere, Rainforth could be raucous on punk party-starter Stretch, and sweetly uplifting on In The Air. The emotional range of Maximum Joy was surely one of their greatest strengths, and this collection gives you every shade of their impeccable repertoire.
Like many of their early ’80s UK peers, Maximum Joy mixed punk, funk, disco, and reggae. This new set captures a band carving its own place with two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy.
.... The group’s prime recording years spanned only from 1981 until 1983, in which time they recorded three singles, an Adrian Sherwood-produced LP, and a handful of compilation tracks. Since then, Maximum Joy have remained largely a footnote, despite the widespread reappraisal of funk-punk that began in the early 2000s, with the rise of DFA. They landed one track on Strut’s landmark 2008 compilation Disco Not Disco and another on last year’s Sherwood at the Controls Volume 1: 1979-1984; it has largely fallen to DJs like Andrew Weatherall and Optimo’s JD Twitch to keep their memory alive for the dancing public.
This new collection overlaps with an out-of-print 2005 anthology on Germany’s Crippled Dick Hot Wax! label, though the compilers here have mostly opted for different mixes, like the 7” “Silent Dub” of “Silent Street” instead of the 12” version, or the 12” mix of “In the Air,” which runs nearly twice the length of the previous comp’s version. Focusing primarily on the group’s three singles, I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights captures a band carving out its own place using two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy. The former is right there on the surface, in the group’s slashing and zig-zagging rhythm section and horn riffs. Bassist Dan Catsis, formerly of the Pop Group, is alternately nimble and brute in his attack: On “Silent Street (Silent Dub),” he traces a taut pattern so neatly you might not even notice that the song is in 9/4 time; on “White and Green Place (Extraterrestrial Mix),” he digs in hard, thumbing a riff that suggests kinship with Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” bassline before sliding fat, greasy fifths down the neck of his instrument.
Ex-Glaxo Babies drummer Charlie Llewellin is the perfect foil for Catsis’ blend of agility and force, with a fondness for crisp, skeletal grooves—nimble dub on “Silent Street,” neck-snapping disco on “Stretch (7 Inch Mix)” and “In the Air (12 Inch Mix)”—that make the most of the emptiness between hi-hats and snares. As for guitarist John Waddington, another Pop Group alumnus, he sides mainly with that gaping negative space, his presence felt mainly in glancing funk chords that fall across the music like the glow of a stained-glass window.
Includes unlimited streaming of Test Pressing - I Can't Stand it Here on Quiet Night - signed by Janine Rainforth
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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This is one of 2 test pressings from Optimal of the release "I Can't Stand it Here On Quiet Night" - released in 2017 on Silent Street Records which sold out.
It will be dispatched with a copy of the front artwork and the sleeve notes and signed by Janine Rainforth. It is for the vinyl only with digital download available when purchase of the vinyl made.
Reviews:
Janine Rainforth’s vocals never sounded better than on this beguiling ode to the quiet hours between the hurried pace of city life, floating out atop dubby bass, off-key piano stabs and straining brass. Elsewhere, Rainforth could be raucous on punk party-starter Stretch, and sweetly uplifting on In The Air. The emotional range of Maximum Joy was surely one of their greatest strengths, and this collection gives you every shade of their impeccable repertoire.
Like many of their early ’80s UK peers, Maximum Joy mixed punk, funk, disco, and reggae.
This new set captures a band carving its own place with two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy.
Focusing primarily on the group’s three singles, I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights captures a band carving out its own place using two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy. The former is right there on the surface, in the group’s slashing and zig-zagging rhythm section and horn riffs. Bassist Dan Catsis, formerly of the Pop Group, is alternately nimble and brute in his attack: On “Silent Street (Silent Dub),” he traces a taut pattern so neatly you might not even notice that the song is in 9/4 time; on “White and Green Place (Extraterrestrial Mix),” he digs in hard, thumbing a riff that suggests kinship with Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” bassline before sliding fat, greasy fifths down the neck of his instrument.
Ex-Glaxo Babies drummer Charlie Llewellin is the perfect foil for Catsis’ blend of agility and force, with a fondness for crisp, skeletal grooves—nimble dub on “Silent Street,” neck-snapping disco on “Stretch (7 Inch Mix)” and “In the Air (12 Inch Mix)”—that make the most of the emptiness between hi-hats and snares. As for guitarist John Waddington, another Pop Group alumnus, he sides mainly with that gaping negative space, his presence felt mainly in glancing funk chords that fall across the music like the glow of a stained-glass window.
It’s singer Janine Rainforth that best embodies Maximum Joy’s exuberance: Having co-founded the group when she was just 18 years old, she channeled her inspirations—singers like X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene and the Slits’ Ari Up—into her own shape-shifting style. On “Stretch,” the A-side of the group’s debut single, she belts it out in the manner of her mentors, slicing into the midrange frequencies with a tone poised at the midway point between speech, screaming, and singing. It’s an entirely fitting complement to the song’s defiant positivity: “Stay positive, stay strong!/Hold safe, hold straight/Don’t terminate, no end!” Listen closely, though, and you’ll hear another side of her: a soft soprano background coo, diffuse as a pastel-colored mist. This is the voice that gives “Silent Street (Silent Dub)” its ethereal, sui generis feel: The lyrics (“Let’s have the music all day long/Let’s have the sound all night”) may scan as reggae boilerplate, but her airy tone lends a uniquely spooky quality to the song, like a ghost haunting the dancehall. It’s a quality you won’t find in any of their contemporaries.
Somewhere in between all that sinew and euphoria, Wrafter’s saxophone and trumpet blaze their own trail, shrieking and soaring and honking. On “In the Air,” no wave skronk comes to the fore, abetted by Rainforth’s own dissonant violin; on “Simmer Til Done,” his lowing, lyrical style has more in common with Clarence Clemons or the “Saturday Night Live” band’s Lenny Pickett. It’s here, as well as in his guttural bellowing on “Stretch,” that Maximum Joy’s music can occasionally feel dated.
Elsewhere, though, Wrafter's woozy tone gives the music its undeniable frisson: On “Silent Street” and “Building Bridges (Building Dub),” his atonal trumpet blasts are the glue that holds everything together. It’s no wonder the compilation opens with “Silent Street,” which was the B-side to their debut single. The song is where they found something inimitable. At the nexus of a bunch of different styles, in the shadow of their peers, they struck a spark that still glows.
"If you can only pick one jazz-influenced post-punk band to listen to, make sure it is Maximum Joy"
Maximum Joy is the
brainchild of vocalist Janine Rainforth and Tony Wafter, who were joined by ex-Pop Group members John Waddington, Dan Catsis & ex- Glaxo Babies drummer Charlie Llewellin. Kev Evans then joined as bassist, alongside Nellee Hooper, Jeremy Hirsch. Rainforth reformed the band 2015....more
Original founder of Maximum Joy, Janine Rainforth made a return to performing her music after an absence of more than two decades. This, her first solo release came out in May 2015. More coming soon! Maximum Joy
Handed the keys to Geoff Barrow's synth collection, the KVB release their 5th album of atmospheric drone and hypnotic darkwave. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 15, 2016
