JOE BARTEL "ANHEDONIA" REVIEW

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Album art for Anhedonia.

Joe Bartel - Anhedonia

“Leaving your comfort zone is something you always want to be doing as an artist,” says Joe Bartel from his Skype window. More than a year has passed since our last interview (about his stellar synthwave EP Isosceles Kramer II) and Joe hasn’t missed a beat. On top of running his own series of underground house shows at his venue, the 319 Club and curating a monthly livestream segment through his Bandcamp, the Twin Cities’ own “stateless Minneapolitan” has been constructing his newest collection of original tunes, performing many of them for those who stay late at his house shows, and as a fan, I can report that the anticipation has been palpable.

“My friend at one of the shows we had over the summer was like, ‘I never leave a Joe Bartel show thinking, well damn, tell us how you really feel!’” Joe recalls with a chuckle. It’s an accurate description. Anhedonia finds Joe returning to the folk punk helm, chock full of the incisive, irreverent jabs at the modern world that he cut his teeth on. While the instrumentation has been stripped back--most of these tunes are made up of Joe’s acoustic strums accompanied by some harmonium, as well as some beautiful cello provided by Jae Yates--the intensity behind these songs comes from Joe’s urgent, raw vocal delivery.

The EP starts off with “End of My Rope”, an acoustic guitar tune complemented by ghostly harmonium passages that reach an almost gospel-inspired timbre. “I’ve been at it for years, I don’t know how to quit,” Joe sings in a heartfelt vibrato. It’s an earnest, powerful intro that sets the stage for the heavy emotions on display throughout this project. The following track, “Mind and Body”, finds the guitars accompanied by Jae Yates’ stirring cello, as Joe’s double tracked vocals sing lyrics like “Everyone has a self and they’ve got a mouth and they’ve got an asshole, but what’s it worth?” and make them sound tear-inducingly profound. Joe’s never shied away from crudeness in the past, but on this project he’s somehow able to turn these shock-value moments into truly disarming examinations of the self.

A bonafide gut-punch moment on the EP comes on the song “Trapped in California”, a slow-burning acoustic ballad about a close friendship that comes to a tragic end. Not only is the song composed beautifully, with Jae’s cello coming back to guide us through the music’s dynamic changes, but Joe’s songwriting skills shine through here as he guides the listener through this emotionally painful narrative, which feels much shorter than its six-minute runtime.

The urgency gets turned way, way up on the album’s closer and lead single, “Artifacts”. This tune starts out deceptively softly, with Joe delivering a hushed corner-of-the-room vocal performance that almost feels like an old folk standard, then builds in intensity as Joe cries that we can’t wait any longer for this world to get better. The song climaxes with Joe delivering a tirade of global crises, from police brutality to the ice caps melting to crony capitalism to the microplastics in our blood. This culminates, in this reviewer’s opinion, in one of Joe Bartel’s best lines ever: “If we don’t do something to change, we’re all gonna fucking die, and that’s not a joke.”

“You see all the horrors of injustice and violence and capitalism and all the things inherent in that in your face and you’re just supposed to breathe it in like it’s the air and pretend it doesn’t smell like shit or whatever,” Joe is telling me. “There’s no filter to this whatsoever and you’re just supposed to imbibe it. So that’s kinda what I’m putting into my songs to be honest. It’s like yeah it’s completely blunt, I’m not trying to present anything other than how I’m actually feeling.” Joe Bartel isn’t fucking around here. Anhedonia is a blistering collection of blunt, emotional, unflinchingly honest songs that will stay with you long after they’re done playing. And if you like what you hear, check out the 319 Club sometime. Ask a punk for the address, they know where it is.

You can watch the full interview on the Melodic Noise Patreon.

Listen to Anhedonia on Spotify or wherever you stream your music: