Springing Back - Noah and the Whale

“How can someone so young sing words so sad?”, Morrissey once sang on The Smiths' 1987 single 'Sheila Take A Bow'.  Having heard the upcoming album from Noah and the Whale, with its marvellous blend of melancholy and futile optimism, an identical question was floating around Gigwise's head regarding Noah and the Whale vocalist and songwriter Charlie Fink.

Upon arrival at the band's studio Fink is anything but the tortured, angsty songwriter that some of the early reviewers of the band's upcoming album 'The First Days of Spring' would have you believe. Rather than play up to the role of heartbroken troubadour Fink remains objective, affable and entertaining company throughout.

The new album makes no secret of the fact that it can be viewed as a soundtrack to the painful breakdown of a relationship that Fink himself personally experienced. “When you record them [the new songs] you're putting yourself back into something that happened a while ago so that can be hard, but it was a very cathartic process”, Fink states regarding the process by which the songs came into being. When asked whether any of the album's lyrical content was too personal to share with rest of the world he states, without a hint of pretension,  “Werner Herzog [German film director] said that “the film maker never averts his eyes”, and that's how I had to be about this. You can't hold back from this, if you're going to do this you then you've got to do it full on”. This is what sums up arguably 'The First Days of Spring''s greatest accomplishment; whist others would choose to wallow in a self-prescribed concoction of pity and melancholy, Fink has not only managed to exorcise his demons but create an impeccable body of music along the way.

Talk Talk, Nick Cave, Wilco and Fairport Convention are all sited by Fink as some of the musical inspirations behind 'The First Days of Spring' and it comes as no surprise, given such an eclectic myriad of artists on rotation, to learn that “Initially when we started to make this record the plan was to make it a lot weirder”. “Weirder” may not be perhaps the best way to describe the band's second album; whilst the 'The First Days of Spring' marks a departure from the twee folk-pop of the band's debut towards a more experimental bleaker territory, it is still unmistakeably a folk album, and more importantly a Noah & the Whale album. “The main thing that I associated with folk wasn't really the instrumentation it was more the narrative of the songs, and I think this album is even more of a narrative” ruminates Fink.

The narrative that Fink speaks of is evident throughout the album.
Structurally it contains eleven tracks with a middle section of three songs, two of which are instrumentals. This “definite structure” marks the transition in songs from those lamenting the loss of love to a more optimistic outlook. Fink explains how his state of mind whilst the album was being recorded was reflected in its final structure, “by the end of the fourth track [there's a] a real low then this mental breakdown in the middle, but then that's also comforting because no matter how lonely you get you always have music, once you've hit the lowest ebb, the next bit goes back up.”

Fink also mentions the revisiting of an old obsession in the run up to the album's release, a return to a character he can identify with and draw much inspiration from. “I was obsessed with Neil Young but these last couple of months I've realised that I'm not as obsessed as I could have been, and I've gone back in even deeper”, enthuses Fink before going on to state the impact the Canadian has had on his attitude towards the music business. “What I respect about Neil Young is... he's done a lot of arsehole things but he just said “People who know me understand that it's just about the music, I just do whatever feels right” and I think that's 100% the right idea.”

Judging by the 'First Days of Spring', which fully demonstrates the band's progression from their debut,  Fink and Noah and the Whale are doing a good job of doing “whatever feels right”. Fink’s songwriting has become richer, emotionally more complex whilst retaining the melodies that attracted comparisons with Neutral Milk Hotel last summer.

Charlie take a bow.