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Noah And The Whale started out as a perky little folk pop band with a spring in their step and an outlook of pure sunshine. Back in 2008 their first album, ‘Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down’ got all the way up to number five in the charts, and the jaunty likes of ‘Two Atoms In A Molecule’ and ‘Shape Of My Heart’ had the nation’s toes a-tapping. At one point it was illegal not to have ‘Five Years Time’ playing over the airwaves at least once an hour. Or so it seemed.
Then, disaster struck. Singer and songwriter Charlie Fink broke up with teen sweetheart and former band member Laura Marling, and things took a turn for the miserable. Second album ‘The First Days Of Spring’ was one long and difficult tale of Charlie’s heartbreak, featuring a sparseness of music that, ‘Blue Skies’ apart, commercial radio couldn’t find a way into. Even fans wondered whether they could bear listening to 45 minutes of a young man whimpering about the breakup of his relationship, until nuances of soaring violin, gentle guitar and broken vocals eventually won us round.
Third album ‘Last Night On Earth’, then, feels like Fink’s attempt to rebuild bridges with the daytime radio DJs that first made his band successful. Opener ‘Life Is Life’ sets his stall out straight away, resolving to close the previous chapter with a chorus of “And it feels like his new life can start”.
After the female-backed music hall pop of ‘Tonight’s The Kind Of Night’ comes ‘L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N’, the instant hit of ‘Five Years Time’ proportions that has already been released as a single and duly plastered all over the airwaves, no doubt soon to the point of nausea, but that’s less the fault of Noah And The Whale and more that of the limited imaginations of the playlist compilers.
‘Wild Thing’ is the first track to echo the more considered sound on the last album, and is also the first occasion on which Fink starts to sound uncannily like Tom Petty, a feeling reinforced later on ‘Waiting For My Chance To Come’, in which you half expect him to break out into “I won’t back doooown” at any moment. There’s a danger of all the positivity becoming relentless, and patience snaps on ‘Give It All Back’, the album’s stinker; a trite rehash of ‘Summer of ‘69’ which commits the musical crime of throwing in one of three pariah terms (‘baby’, ‘yeah’ and ‘tonight’ – in this case ‘tonight’) where it’s neither wanted nor needed.
The most significant change on this record is in the instrumentation, which feels more computer generated. Drum sounds are machine-like, and the violin Fink’s brother used to provide is scarcely evident. It’s no coincidence that the strings-heavy ‘Just Before We Met’, and the one-and-a-half minute piano instrumental ‘Paradise Stars’, are the strongest tracks on here. The suspicion is that Fink has created the whole thing himself with only a laptop for company which, if true, might be efficient but doesn’t make for a great record.
That said, ‘The Line’ is a convincing throwback to Noah And The Whale of old, and on closer ‘Old Joy’ Fink gets his money’s worth from the female vocalists he’s employed, turning them into nigh-on a gospel choir for the finale.
Those that came to love Noah And The Whale for their folk roots are likely to be a little miffed with this third album, but perhaps forced saccharine positivity was what Fink needed to counterbalance the last album and restore relations with commercial radio. If so, maybe album number four will be the one that pleases everybody.
