EP REVIEW: BIG SPECIAL – ‘O’JOY!’

It’s never not astonishing to think about how BIG SPECIAL, of all bands, have spent the last handful of years enjoying a nonstop rise. They’re not trendy or cool or primed for a nice algorithmic boost, and yet, that hasn’t seemed to matter. They’ve instead managed to cultivate something that’s impossible to look away from. The intersection of blues, minimalist post-punk, spoken-word poetry and working-class gristle has been fully realised from the start, and it’s only proven more compelling. POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES was a great album, so much so that it warranted a surprise follow-up just a year later in NATIONAL AVERAGE (also great, FYI). Adjoin to that a good live show that’s ever-expanding in appearances, and it couldn’t be more obvious that things are looking up. You’re practically forced to recognise it.

Nonetheless, if there were to be a slip-up, it’d be with this. O’JOY! has it written all over, and not because it’s yet another drop in quick succession. Rather, it comprises leftover material that didn’t fit the vision of BIG SPECIAL’s previous two albums, reworked and repackaged as a 10-track EP. In other (more cynical) words, they’ve done a sweep of the cutting-room floor, spruced up what they found, and got another swift new release from it. Coming from a more unscrupulous band, that could definitely read as forcing out a victory lap by any means possible.

We’re not quite at that extreme with O’JOY!, but there’s still some truth to be found there. It’s not as good as anything that preceded it, and more often than not does feel like a compilation of loose ends. These songs are smaller and less adventurous in a number of ways, and generally less impressive when arranged as they are. PLAINTIVE NATIVE and ONLY FREE WHEN SLEEPING parcel ideas that have been done elsewhere with more standout form; conversely, the Diet Sam Fender of HOTEL seems to cordon off most of the duo’s strengths singlehandedly. BIG SPECIAL are best when they can be wry and snarky, and have that embedded in their work as a tenet of perseverance. By its very nature, O’JOY! just doesn’t have that same weight and strength at its disposal. It does, pretty unsurprisingly, feel pieced together.

And yet, even as the collection of cast-offs that it is, it’s testament to how flexible and transferable BIG SPECIAL’s talents are that flecks of gold shine through all the same. O’JOY! has some good stuff within it through individual cuts, more so than when treated as a full package. The aforementioned pair of PLAINTIVE NATIVE and ONLY FREE WHEN SLEEPING, divorced from the greater EP, feel like textbook BIG SPECIAL in execution. Joe Hicklin rattles off his sardonic, drawled poetry about modern Britain’s dourness, familiar but enough to leave you rapt as ever. Following that is the Nick Cave-esque LAZARUS (particularly fitting if the reference on its hook is intentional), and THE WAKE, with its single metaphor that’s not too hard to parse, but spirals far enough outwards to get it well over the hump.

As it goes on, O’JOY! operates more like a holding facility for loose or disconnected ideas, rather than anything too mercenary in its assemblage. The further that BIG SPECIAL go off script, the more fragmented they appear, but not at the expense of their intrigue. That’s baked into them at this point, and they’ve got the platform to coax it out in different ways. Here, that comes through in slow, aching dirges like GARDEN OF FOOLS and DRAGGED UP A HILL (and thrown down again), or the patchwork acoustic pop of SLUGLIFE. Across all examples, Hicklin sinks into his shuddering bluesman register, effective a cheat for lending even the smallest of BIG SPECIAL’s compositions some resonance. It works, too; again, you can almost block out the fact that there’s maybe one sinew of connective tissue to found among some of these tracks.

That, ultimately, is how O’JOY! seals itself as another win for BIG SPECIAL. Depending on the angle you view it from, it’s either more or less than the sum of its parts, with neither outcome being all that bad. Even the worst-case scenario—a disjointed grab-bag of concepts that’d be done better elsewhere—has the boon of its creators’ extraordinarily high floor. That’s not common, and yet, BIG SPECIAL sink into it as if it were nothing. They’ve put out a full record of run-offs, marketed it basically as such, and come out on top in the end because they’re good for it. Even if O’JOY! isn’t surpassing its better, fuller, more developed siblings in a hurry (or at all), there’s enough quality in it to ensure that it has a place regardless. Considering everything else that BIG SPECIAL have rocketed themselves into lately, it’s best to just not doubt cases like this.

For fans of: Nick Cave, Sleaford Mods, Yard Act

‘O’JOY!’ by BIG SPECIAL is released on 5th June on SO Recordings.

Words by Luke Nuttall