Stories abound about the recording process for this third full-length from No Joy. One of the most inter- esting is that the gloomy Montreal shoegaze outfit apparently holed themselves up in a Costa Rican farmhouse for 12-hour mixing sessions once the recording sessions were done and dusted.

Of course, anybody familiar with Jasmine White-Glutz and Laura Lloyd won’t be especially surprised; the band’s modus operandi involves painstakingly building compositions with densely-layered guitar overdubs and treated, multi-tracked vocals as a cumulative sonic onslaught of shock and awe.

The difference this time though is the sheer, Herculean size of it all. More Faithful is a finely-sculpted monument of grandiosity and complexity, a record that sounds genuinely epic in scale and ambition. It’s a high-risk, high-reward gambit though, one that requires exceptionally strong material to avoid songs collapsing in on themselves. Unfortunately, there aren’t quite enough hooks here to make things work. In fairness, where More Faithful does succeed, the results are utterly sublime.

I Am An Eye Machine gradually builds a head of steam before exploding into life with a gnarled, hulking mass of guitar; layer upon layer of riffs coalescing into an orgiastic climax. Oftentimes though, songs seem to fall over, lurching into oblivion without ever really getting going. Fuzz-fests like Corpo Daemon recall Hüsker Dü without the riffs, while Chalk Snake sort of just lumbers around aimlessly. Patient listeners will doubtless find reward but this is just too much like hard work.