Blogarhythms

After dedicating the lion’s share of this week’s posts to what can only be described as an old-school renaissance I was tempted to make a complete 180 degree turn away from the past and feature some sort of cutting-edge electronic music or something. But when I woke up this morning and put on a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of my good friend and sometime collaborator Sankofa, a rap-artist whose name is derived from a West African term which sort-of encapsulates my much belabored point about knowledge of the past being key to understanding the present and advancing into the future, I knew I needed to stay on theme.

As luck would have it, Manchester, UK-based Jim Noir — a one-man-band who utilizes modern bedroom-studio technology to recreate the rich harmonies, catchy melodies and fuzzy psychedelic experimentation of ’60s Psyche-Pop, infusing it with comparatively space-age-sounding 21st-century-standard drum-machines and synthesizers — just dropped a new record which musically embodies my sentiment. Picking up where his acclaimed debut left off and advancing his sound further Noir’s eponymously-titled sophomore LP is all at once retro, modern, post-modern and futuristic. It’s like a concentrated ray of bright yellow acid-soaked flower-child sunshine (with flecks of lo-fi dirt and grime floating breezily through it) shining down on a stack of CDR’s with such intensity that they melt into a pile of neon goo while dayglo-colored iPods hold hands and dance around it in circles in a verdant meadow.

No, seriously…

Album opener “All Right” (the first full song on the disc) sets the stage for all the robo-hippie frolicking with it’s vocoded vocal, primitive drum-machine beat, bouncy synth-bass, ping-pong synths & sweeping lazer sounds that fits somewhere between the proto-Electronica of Bruce Haack & the dirty Psychetronica of Black Moth Super Rainbow. “Ships and Clouds,” with it’s sturdy backbeat, totally synthesizer-based instrumentation (complete with House-influenced keyboard vamps), layered vocal harmonies and baroque melodies sounds like The Association given a Post-Disco makeover. While “Happy Day Today” melds fuzz-guitar, plucky acoustic guitar, tight harmonies, synths and four-on-the-floor drum programming into a Beach Boys-meets-Kraftwerk sunshine-Pop tune for the club and the drive to the beach.

The centerpiece of the record for me though is “Good Old Vinyl,” a neo-Chamber-Pop number which sounds authentically old-school until you notice that Noir is singing about the death of the compact disc, comparing it to other shunned media formats, and that the music he’s doing it over is almost wholly electronically created. And if that doesn’t wrap up my week-long obsession with music’s past, present and future (and segue perfectly into tomorrow’s Records at Random post) I don’t know what does!

Jim Noir “Good Old Vinyl”

- El Keter