The kitchen-cupboard Brian Wilson wiggles his crusty old bedroom-slippers at us again with a rather special brew of Gorky and Furries style horseplay and 60s recording techniques. Stealing liberally from Pet Sounds, tracks like ‘My Patch’ and ‘How To Be So Real’ sparkle like diamonds in a men’s urinal regardless of the iffy means through which they’re earned. It’s all perilously close to being all pastiche, but its pretty all the same.
Alongside the liberal doses of inspiration found in Warp releases, there’s heaped teaspoons of The Kinks, Stone Roses, Air, XTC, Beach Boys, Belle and Sebastian and Beatles records. In fact for the most part, Noir’s first full-length release is a transparently eager homage to the sound of the sixties. ‘I Can’t See’ listens pretty much like an outtake from Brian Wilson’s nutty preparations for ‘Smile’; exact as its feeble parping organs, distracted lyrics and layered yuletide harmonies are to the lo-fi, hand-crafted arrangements of the pre-Van Dyke Park surf classics. The prickly guitar stabs and harmonies on ‘Tell Me What To Do’? Pure ‘Revolver’. The treated pianos, tambourines and shakers on ‘Tower Of Love’ – pure ‘Pet Sounds’. The trouble is though, it’s so bloody marvellously done that it quite rightly ranks alongside such classics as beautifully layered pop. In fact it’s so of this period that you’d be hard pressed to call it retro. My only gripe is that Noir has still not managed to find the song that’ll crack the alternative mainstream and lift him above the scores of other anonymous and interesting lo-fi generals assembling on the peripheries of cult-success. That he’s a good mimic goes without saying, but there’s little here that suggests he’s a good mechanic. Pulp waited 15 years for their defining moment – but folks may not be as patient this time. In fact, there’s a very real danger that Noir’s gentle, trifling air of inconsequence and frivolousness may morph into total irrelevance at any point.
Stephen Jones and early Babybird may have already done the Casio and a roll of gaffer-tape thing to death, but every generation needs its fumbling and unshaven music-obsessed schizophrenic. And this current generation just got theirs.