Currently riding high on a critical wave of rave reviews and plaudits from across the board, Jim Noir’s debut album ‘Tower Of Love’ compiles his first three EP’s in a long-player format. A while back The Beta Band and Lemon Jelly kicked off their respective recording careers in a similar fashion and in the case of The Betas, produced one of my favourite records from the last 10 years or so.
Mancunian Noir hasn’t done anything here that quite matches those for fiendish invention and poppy, sonic experimentalism (or for that matter produced a collection that feels like a cohesive album which the others somehow managed), but he has fashioned a debut which suggests that he’s one to watch for sure. Musically what we have here takes from in a general way, the sunshine-pop of the late 60's and also the amiable mid-tempo rhythms heard in the music of Lemon Jelly and another manc, Badly Drawn Boy. So expect lots of acoustic guitar, heavenly vocal harmonies and an emphasis on melodic pop.
Following in the footsteps of other one-man studio enfant-terribles such as Todd Rundgren, Prince, Emitt Rhodes and er, Hasil Adkins (RIP), everything you hear on ‘Tower of Love’ has been produced and played by Noir himself, I believe, and the overall end result is by and large, very pleasing. Here we have several infectious and irresistible pop tunes with themes ranging from having one’s football stolen by a nasty neighbour, to the contemporary dilemma of dealing with your computer crashing and losing all your work.
To describe the quality arc of the record - it starts well, struggles to maintain interest in the middle but recovers and finishes strongly at the end. The finest songs for me appear first, such as ‘My Patch’ with its amiable dancey groove, ‘I Me You I’m Your’ which brings to mind The Millennium (always good), ‘Computer Song’ where quite minimal means, drums, bass, vocals and acoustic, achieve a very pretty layered sound and ‘Eany Meany’ with its slapped guitar figure and swinging rhythm, are winners one and all.
Then a kind of mini-ennui sets in on ‘Key of C’ (which it is indeed in) and ‘Turbulent Weather’. Its not that they are overly-weak songs as such, but at this stage the juvenile appeal of the album begins to wear thin, to these ears at least. A little of this sort of ‘lets pretend we’re kids again’ thing goes a long way and too much of it makes repeated listening a chore I find. On these tracks the musical interest isn’t quite strong enough to rescue the songs from just being unremittingly twee and in Noir’s case the whole effect comes across as if it’s a rather too self-conscious effort to appear ‘naive’, unlike with say, Brian Wilson, where one feels as if he absolutely identifies and believes in what he’s singing about, be it vegetables, wind chimes, teenage love, surfing or whatever.
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Indeed the spectre of that sandpit loving California dreamer looms large here in general, from the intricate sea of double tracked vocal harmonies on ‘My Patch’, and the instro title track, which are both strongly reminiscent of Pet Sounds, to the childlike Wilson-esque lyrics on many of the songs.
But perhaps its best not be too harsh – this is after all the sound of an artist still finding his feet and in the end Noir does, just about, manage to successfully navigate the thin line that separates charming from twee, like Bagpuss from My Little Pony. This is most apparent on three fine songs towards the end of the record - the lovely ‘Turn your Frown Into a Smile’, ‘A Quiet Man’ with its clever double-time changes and Super Furry-ish trippy pop feel, and lastly ‘The Only Way’, with its gorgeous melody and distanced backing vocals which sound oddly like Siphon & Carbuncle’s ‘Only Living Boy in New York’, which brings the album to a close save for a short ‘Surfs Up’-like hidden track.
So as I said already, one to watch. I look forward to catching him in the flesh and seeing how the studio sound here translates to a live situation. And hopefully it won’t be long until Mr. Noir returns to the studio and gives us a consistent debut album proper that will blow our socks off, for the potential for pop greatness is most certainly evident in these grooves. Go on good sir, give him his football back. He deserves it.
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