Some shows you can wriggle your way to the front of, camera held aloft to signify important picture-taking needs. Not a Noah and the Whale show. Half an hour before the concert at the Neptune would start, the floor was already jammed tight, and not in that Seattle personal-space-and-a-half way, everyone keeping a respectful distance because after all we’re not savages.
Waves of audience adoration aside, the band took an all-business approach, with lead singer Charlie Fink not chatting much between songs: “This song is called…,” he’d say, and the band would launch into another indie folk-rock hit. After a few numbers, he shrugged out of his jacket, unveiling a burgundy vest to general applause. “I must ask how you are,” he said, in a way that suggested the idea had been suggested to him. It developed that everyone was fine. Had anyone seen them at Sasquatch? They had.
If you have an indie-music-playing device, you’re most likely familiar with Noah and the Whale’s “5 Years Time,” and, more recently, off the new album Last Night on Earth, the single “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” Does Fink’s deadpan baritone remind you a little of Beat Happening‘s more basso Calvin Johnson? How about The Nails? The lyrics tend to have a touch of Lou Reed and Tom Waits. As it turns out, Fink will back me up on those influences, and list a few more:
There’s plenty to listen to on the new album, then, if “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” wears out its welcome. In “Wild Thing,” the opening line tells you it’s not that kind of wild thing song: “Time can make more rubble out of dreams than anything.” There’s anger, stains, and bruises, and a morality brigade. In “The Line,” a relationship is on the rocks: “She says, ‘I’ve lived my life like a diamond / bright and hard like a diamond.'”
Later, in “Tonight’s the Kind of Night,” the escape is made and “everything could change.” Deftly, all that was bottled up now spools out in what sounds like dance music, though the lyrics are far from bubblegum: “the engine hums, a humble tune / a melody of rubber and lead.”
No surprise, ending a set in Seattle with “sun, sun, sun / all over our bodies” will go over very well. For the encore, the band sang “Old Joy” and “The First Days of Spring.”
