20/05: Noah and The Whale + Slow Club @ PLUG

[Plug]

Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Noah and the Whale + Slow Club

Price: £7.50 adv

Door time: 7.30pm

Age: 14+

 

Charlie Fink started playing the guitar when he was a young man. He started writing songs when he was a little older. He discovered the concepts of love, death and time shortly after this and soon could think about little else. The remainder of his formative years Charlie spent with his ears inside headphones recording his own songs or listening to musicians with similar preoccupations.

 

Eventually it occurred to Charlie that his compulsion to expel in song his deep-set morbid anxieties might serve some public purpose. Initially he ventured forth beyond his gravel drive on his own. Soon, however, Charlie decided that he better have his brother Doug on board otherwise he might get lonely and people might not listen properly. Doug plays the drums which can be quite loud, so Charlie took away his cymbals and forged them into a triangle and tambourine. The searing strings of classical violin prodigy Tom Fiddle had long impressed Charlie. Tom liked Charlie's songs and Noah and the Whale was conceived. They played their first gig in late 2006 to the sound engineer, Doug's housemate and Tom Hatred. They all loved it. So began months of gigging in corners, on tables and inside cupboards.

 

Charlie's early bedroom demos began changing hands on the interweb and in dark corners around Brick Lane, like a secret musical handshake for the initiated. Eventually versions of these lo-fi gems found their way into the impeccably manicured digits of Young and Lost Club early in 2007. Within months there were few postcodes in the Capital that had not played host to the determined foursome. At this juncture it seemed prudent to pass Charlie's melancholic optimism to posterity. Young and Lost Club agreed, and ‘Five Years Time' appeared as a limited release single in September 2007.

 

Word of the energetic live shows and the carefully-crafted folk melodies was passed into the wind and audiences swelled with every gig. Laura Marling was catching dandelion stalks in the same wind and happened to catch this word. She was soon ensconced in yellow tights behind a wooden shaker, the feminine Beauty to Charlie's baritone Beast. She was having such a fine time that she invited Charlie to produce her second EP, which made her smile even broader until Charlie agreed to make her album ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim'.

 

Gigs continued to be played apace, some with bands that had appeared on actual records. By autumn 2007, Noah and the Whale had driven themselves in small cars the length and breadth of the UK, just making it in time to get on stage before Feist, Jeffrey Lewis and Broken Social Scene amongst other marvellous live acts. A sophisticated Myspace gig listing algorithm puts the figure at 150 shows in less than 18 months. Noah and the Whale's second limited release single, ‘2 Bodies 1 Heart' was released in January 2008 just before their second UK headline circuit on the Young and Lost Club Tour.

 

Noah and the Whale's debut album represents a unified world view of some abstract and some concrete reasoning, a developing philosophy framed by self-referential imagery and symbolism. Employing a purposefully self-contained vocabulary, themes and metaphors for Charlie's introspective fixations recur and repeat, answering questions and posing new ones. Time is consistently presented as a process of erosion, love is portrayed as a heart, central, vital, core, and death is darkness, faceless and thankless. The unthinkable can be judged in solid form and somehow made more manageable. Ultimately it is a practical vision, an exercise that can be at once self-doubting and self-knowing, both self-interrogation and self-prescription.