Photos and review by Jennie Book
@jenniebookphotography

Joywave is North American’s number one band with the best awesome songs to not selling out arenas ratio. Their music is fun, danceable, singable, and sounds really great live, as they showed the sold out crowd at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on September 26^th.

Core bandmates Daniel Armbruster, Joseph Morinelli, and Paul Brenner plus their touring crew brought their Permanent Pleasure Tour to the storied Hall and played a 20 song set to fans that included favorites like “Dangerous,” “Tongues,” and “After Coffee,” with energy that stayed high the entire night.

The stage setup included a “Permanent Pleasure” neon sign that travels with them and sits up high on the backdrop, plus a large inflatable sleeping cat in the rear-middle of the stage that rotates on a turntable during the show. This cat as I understand it is a large scale blowup replica of a smaller cat included with their vinyl pressing of Permanent Pleasure that’s meant to sit on your record while it plays. And then the boys came out wearing green pajamas. Shortie pajamas. And one might say that frontman Armbruster isn’t your typical rock star – when they toured as openers for Thirty Seconds to Mars a few years ago the contrast between he and Jared Leto may have been stark as far as machismo goes. But this slight, somewhat nerdy vocalist shouldn’t be underestimated– his voice is great, he tells great stories– (“The other night Jason from our opening band Hunny went to see Johnny Marr in San Francisco, and Jason went backstage and told him he was in town opening for Joywave, and Johnny Marr said, ‘Oh that’s a cool band. They have some tunes’”), and he kept the energy up through the whole set, interacting with fans on the rail, being charming, never flagging.

The night came to a close with “It’s a Trip,” “Swimming In The Glow,” and “Destruction” with a little harmonica intro by Taylor Dubray after which the crowd went nuts.

Joywave plays a great live show and it’s highly recommended that you catch them if they come anywhere close to you. More info can be found at www.joywavemusic.com