Joy, by Apollo 100

I listened to this album on Spotify because it was the only studio album by the group–a short-lived studio group famous for its one hit, the title track of this album. It is remarkable just how unpopular this group is on Spotify–their only hit (which hit the top ten) has only about 160,000 streams, and some of their songs from this album have been played less than 3,000 times when I played it. This is remarkably low, and quite unjustly so, as this is an album that is easy to enjoy. Having been familiar with a few of the songs already, and seeing that the album was short at 11 songs and under 30 minutes, this was an easy decision to play and review.

As far as the album goes, there is a bit more than one would expect if one comes into the album knowing only Joy (taken from Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring). Six of the eleven songs have titles that come from classical music [1], and the other five refer to jazz and pop music. While all of the songs are instrumentals, and all of them except for Air on G are shorter than three minutes, the variety of musical style and instrumentation is welcome. If none of these songs other than the title track is an obvious hit, the songs in general are quite good, and some of them, like Libido and Reach For The Sky deserve far more play than they receive. Overall, this is an album of instrumentals that you can listen to without having to worry about skipping material, and that make site a solid 4/5 choice for me as an album I can recommend without reservation.

[1] One of the songs on the Spotify songlist appears to be in error. The last song on this album is labeled as Classical Wind, a reference to the song Classical Gas but a different song with the same title that is also in the group’s discography actually is a version of Classical Gas, while the Classical Wind mislabeled here is a different and unrelated recording. Since only about 2500 plays of this album exist on Spotify, though, it hasn’t been a huge priority for them to fix, since it is possible no one has yet brought it to their attention.