Club Night’s sophomore album “Joy Coming Down” is an ode to loss and what follows. The record borrows its title from the Fred Thomas lyrics “Til you find yourself found with the graves in the ground / Tears rolling out of the eyes wet as a cloud / but it’s only the sound of your joy coming down.” This is the logic of “Joy Coming Down”: things transmute. Tears become clouds become the joy and pain of our forebearers. Energy can never be lost, only transformed.
The first track “Expo” opens with emotional bargaining. We are lifted into a reverie, twinkling and quiet, only to be jolted awake and knocked around into quick, triumphant celebration. We’re all invited to the party. And we’re celebrating grief.
There is a platitude that grief doesn’t shrink, and that instead, we must grow around it. “Joy Coming Down” grows around it, a trumpet vine proliferating violently on a north-facing wall. “Expo” is a maximalist anthem pushing against forces larger than itself. In it, guitarist Ian Tatum’s strumming turns from slow riff to full-blown panic, no longer growing around grief but dancing around the campfire, taunting it, biting its thumb at it, inviting it to dance with us. Drummer Nicholas Cowman deftly propels the track through chaos to the soft glow of a muted refrain: “Begin again, begin again.”
The album holds as its central force the whiplash of collective and personal grief, punctuated by the solace of small pleasures. Tracks, like “Dream” and “Dream II,” give into the sludge of loss, with Tatum and bassist Devin Trainer creating a textured, enveloping soundscape—both eerie and comforting. By mid-album, the recklessness, flight and fancy of early tracks like “Expo” or “Lake” have given way to mourning.
With Bertram’s generous lyrics and Cowman’s irresolute tempo, the album itches between submission and defiance. “Rot” slows to a meditative pace, anchored by Trainer’s deliberate bassline. Bertram sings “Sunburned as I slide under the water / a kiss where I glowed bright / burnt and hungover,” as if trying to capture decades of memory in a bridge. The song contends with an impossible task: cataloguing a past that resists capture. If we remember hard enough, long enough, will those we lost live on?
“Judah” and “Station” hint at healing. In “Station,” Bertram sings with aching clarity: “I know I’ll see her again / in a flash of lightning.” By now, the fits and starts of the earlier tracks have settled, but the album’s logic of transmutation remains. The beloved grandmother becomes an infant becomes the lightning bolt you see in the distance. This is how we hold loss.
The closing track, “Rabbit,” is an elegy to Bertram’s late mentor and friend, Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit. The song operates as a sort of conversation with oneself, the lost loved one, and the universe. Painful and triumphant, the song crescendos and decrescendos in the same breath. High-pitched and desperate, layered vocals sing out, “Everything will change once you realize / that we are a part of it.” The collective spirit threaded throughout the album comes into sharp relief: “I am the product of everyone I’ve ever met.” Borrowing Hutchinson’s words, the album ends by embracing a shared responsibility to transform grief into collective action: “While I’m here, I’ll make tiny changes to earth.”
After all, we are only embodied for so long, and once we are gone, we may become lightning, or a song, or in this case, an album.
