Joan Of Arc

Joan of Arc emerged in Chicago as a lasting indie rock endeavor defined by ongoing sonic exploration, coming together right after the 1995 dissolution of emocore outfit Cap'n Jazz. Across shifting lineups spanning decades, Tim Kinsella stood as the sole constant participant while the ensemble blended emo closeness, punk edges, and post-rock textures through recordings that ranged from melodic rock and somber instrumentals to noise explorations, protest pieces, and elaborate theatrical compositions. Their debut full-length arrived in 1997 as the off-kilter emo album A Portable Model of Joan of Arc, after which they repeatedly tested limits and defied conventions on efforts including Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain (2004), Testimonium Songs (2013), inspired by historical court proceedings, and He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands (2017), an improvisation-driven collection issued two decades into their run that climbed into the Top 30 of the Billboard Independent Albums chart. The group disbanded in 2020 after entering the studio to lay down what they knew would serve as their final album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby.

Originally drawn from Cap'n Jazz, singer/guitarist Tim Kinsella, drummer Mike Kinsella, and bassist Sam Zurick sought a fresh musical path once that earlier band ended. They achieved this shift by teaming in summer 1996 with keyboardist/guitarist Jeremy Boyle and guitarist Erik Bocek, discarding punk constraints in favor of open-ended approaches that incorporated tape loops and electronics.

Adopting the name Joan of Arc, the musicians joined their friends the Promise Ring—also featuring ex-Cap'n Jazz players—on an August 1996 tour, where their live performances drew enthusiastic responses just ahead of the first 7" single, Method & Sentiment. Following writing and recording sessions that fall, they resurfaced in 1997 with full-length debut A Portable Model of Joan of Arc, marking further development into a unit equally forceful and forward-thinking that drew listeners from both emo and post-rock circles. The next year brought How Memory Works, a more direct rendering of their ambitious approach. Joan of Arc opened 1999 by issuing Live in Chicago 1999, followed a year later by Gap. So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness surfaced in February 2003 even as plans for a larger project were set aside, with the additional material appearing three months afterward on In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust, which captured some of Tim and Mike Kinsella's most intense work to date. After signing with Polyvinyl, the band tracked the experimental Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain and put it out in 2004. All at Once, which the members characterized as a "casual folk-drone record," came out in 2006 via Record Label. The creepy, wordless Orchard Vale Soundtrack arrived in October 2007, succeeded in 2008 by Boo! Human.

Throughout the 2000s Joan of Arc's roster continued to change while Tim Kinsella remained the fixed core. In 2009 he contacted earlier bandmates to create Don't Mind Control, an unusual album showcasing 18 distinct groups, each containing a former Joan of Arc participant; the finished set featured contributions from Vacations, Ghosts and Vodka, and Pillars & Tongues. Another collaborative release, Oh Brother, appeared in 2011, by which point the central lineup had settled into a quartet of Tim Kinsella, bassist Bobby Burg, drummer Theo Katsaounis, and guitarist Victor Villareal. Villareal and Kinsella, longtime acquaintances who renewed their partnership after Cap'n Jazz regrouped in 2010, helped the four-piece move straight from a month-long European tour into Electrical Audio to cut Life Like with Steve Albini, issuing the album in May 2011. Testimonium Songs, another characteristically conceptual Joan of Arc project, followed in 2013 as a record of material composed for a stage collaboration with experimental theater ensemble Every House Has a Door, drawing from poet Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, itself a rendering of early American courtroom transcripts concerning workplace negligence. With Boyle returning to fill the vacancy left by Villareal's departure and artist/vocalist Melina Ausikaitis added as a fifth official member, He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands reached listeners in early 2017. Twenty years after their debut full-length, it became their first entry on Billboard rankings, including the Heatseekers and Independent Albums charts. Their subsequent album began as an intended split between Joan of Arc instrumentals and a cappella performances by Ausikaitis; after Tim recruited cousin and prior collaborator Nate Kinsella to produce, Nate merged the halves rather than keeping them apart. Released in mid-2018 and featuring only Ausikaitis on lead vocals, the outcome was titled 1984. Once touring behind that record concluded, the band chose to dissolve, yet returned to the studio one final time aware that the tracks being recorded would constitute their last album. Volatile and disruptively beautiful, Tim Melina Theo Bobby appeared in December 2020.

Following the breakup, all members sustained musical activity through other projects. Joyful Noise issued A Window & a Mirror in 2024, a compilation assembling Joan of Arc releases spanning 1996 to 2003 and centered on their initial period with Jade Tree. Beyond reissuing the first five albums, select versions of A Window & a Mirror contained an exclusive 7" of previously unreleased material, a hardbound book of photographs and ephemera, plus entry to an extensive online archive holding hundreds of live recordings, demos, and other rare artifacts from the group's extended history.