The over-capitalization of a distinctive sound can obviously be the death knell to really any kind of music, but neo-psychedelia has become an especially cursed genre. With the almost ceaseless number of bands trying to hearken back to 13th Floor Elevators and Rubber Soul during the mid-’90s, it felt like the more "authentically" one would interpret the psychedelic style, the more synthetic the interpretation seemed to be: ’65-era bass fuzz, delays and phase-shifting often sounded like it comes out on conveyor belts, where sound engineers assemble wah-wah sounds for bands to cart around like a spare tire. A kind of processed tofu-variety wall of sound.
But Jim Noir is as good an advertisement for fresh and interesting neo-psychedelia as you’ll find since Gruff Rhys. Two years after making a few mainstream ripples with an Adidas commercial, Noir is taking admirable cues from classic psych pop and cheesy electronica. The empty signifiers of haplessly assembled 1960s instruments are well-avoided, and while he drenches his vocal harmonies with a sunshiny Kinks-like matter-of-fact lilt, Noir quickly escapes becoming trapped in a time warp of references by making pop an intriguingly complex craft.
Each song uses similar compositional tricks to emphasize that kind of complexity. “Welcome Commander Jameson,” “Happy Day Today,” and “Look What You’ve Done To Her” all share in common circular song patterns and contrapuntal vocal cannons that wind around like an amusement park teacup ride, the vocal harmonies spinning inside massively rotating instrumentation. A single guitar will find a groove to sink into and repeat in an almost lethargically static process, while voices split off spinning into varying verses only to meet up again with its originating vocal rotation. “Look Around You” similarly flits in and out of pop shifts, jumping between a Beta Band-like shuffle melody and a throttling California pop bassline.
The result is a cache of songs that are somewhat transposable with one another, but they’re undeniably well-crafted pieces of music, let alone psych-pop. It’s this mix of pop and craftsmanship, tribute and bastardization that gives this neo-psychedelia real pertinence, and Noir sounds accomplished in all of that.
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