Out this week from Desperate Journalist: ‘The Victim’ is our track of the day today.

Jo Bevan’s stunning vocals coupled with late period Duran Duran/REM guitar layers give us a taste of the band’s fourth album, Maximum Sorrow!, recorded entirely in Crouch End in the midst of the Covid pandemic and out now on Fierce Panda.

“Firstly, the album title: One of my favourite artists of the last twenty years is Kevin Bewersdorf, an early-ish proponent of what was initially called “net art”. One of his main creations was a project called Maximum Sorrow, which incorporated stock images and corporate design elements juxtaposed with a kind of Taoist spirituality. The concept was based on the idea that once you reach a point of full saturation of melancholy, then you can’t absorb any more, and you are thus free – or it could also be a slogan for a company offering incredibly efficient misery delivered directly into your brain from the Information Superhighway. Many of the works have been deleted from the internet now sadly but you can find some images and essays he wrote if you look hard enough. The thing which really appealed about this project was the fact that initially, due to the jargon inherent in the nascent global-business-data-optimist-ecommerce world which the imagery was lifted from, it was difficult to tell whether the intention was satirical or earnest – and now I am pretty sure that it’s equal parts of both. Bewersdorf’s work very much resonates with me as your classic sad self-aware millennial, concerned with meaning and authenticity whilst surrounded by culture with a thousand layers of irony all over it – and of course the aesthetic appealed, growing up as my generation did in an ever more commercialised, smoothed and shined, soulless-looking world.”

Jo Bevan

Catch Desperate Journalist live:

Wed 28 July | Rough Trade East (In-Store Album Launch Show + Album Signing) | London

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Sat 15th January 2022 | Thekla | Bristol, UK

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