Joy Cleaner - Spent Flowers

Almost certainly due to hit the big 2-0-0 this year, Jigsaw has worked with a damn lot of bands! And yet, due to the facts that we don't do contracts and the bands we work with are totally free to come and go as they please, we've never really had a "proper" label roster or anything like that. But if I DID have to cobble together a list of "Jigsaw Records artists", it probably wouldn't be very long - and New Jersey's Joy Cleaner would unquestionably be front and center. Back in 2017, we were thrilled to spread the good word via their stellar debut album, "Total Hell"; and then two years later, we excitedly put out their even better second album, "You're So Jaded". During this time, the band did have a wee bit of extra-curricular activity, with a cassingle & split flexi on Are You Kidding Me? Tapes (both of which preceded their first LP) and another cassingle/7" lathe on Dromedary Records that came in between the two lps. Well, while the band is working on their third album, they've put together this odds-and-ends collection with those six afore-mentioned songs, another four that were released digitally or on compilations, and four more songs that have not yet seen the light of day! But don't be fooled - just because this is an assortment of recordings from a wide variety of dates/sources doesn't mean this isn't an excellent album in it's own right. I should know - it took me over two hours to get the sequence just right, so that it both flowed together really well AND made sense as a two-sided album (an art that often gets neglected in today's realm of single-sided CD albums)! The end result is a solid third album/non-album that you can put in the same class as "Tossing Seeds", "The Question Is No" or "Fossils". Welcome home, Joy Cleaner!