Noah and the Whale...The First Days of Spring(2009)[FLAC]

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/ecda1caba5b5df4cd940af8e671442a7/2325571.jpg 2009 The First Days of Spring CD Mercury 2710497 1 The First Days of Spring 6:40 2 Our Window 5:49 3 I Have Nothing 2:43 4 My Broken Heart 5:13 5 Instrumental I 1:34 6 Love of an Orchestra 2:03 7 Instrumental II 1:37 8 Stranger 5:19 9 Blue Skies 4:09 10 Slow Glass 3:18 11 My Door Is Always Open 5:09 "This is a song for anyone with a broken heart," announces Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink on Blue Skies, the ninth track on their second album. By this stage in proceedings, however, the broken-hearted have been so exceptionally well-catered for that this hardly needs saying. In fact, The First Days of Spring could no more diligently attend to the needs of the broken-hearted if it had been set as an academic assignment: "Write and record an album for the broken-hearted in under 45 minutes. Take care to use strings (tremulous), solitary guitar (plangent) and a choir (stirring)." Two years ago, Noah and the Whale trafficked in the kind of faux-naif folk-pop (such as surprise hit 5 Years Time) that Michael Cera and Ellen Page might have strummed at the end of Juno, and dressed like characters from a Wes Anderson movie. Their name, despite looking like an Old Testament typo, refers to Noah Baumbach's Anderson-produced indie film The Squid and the Whale. The critic Elbert Ventura recently argued that Anderson's style, "at once ironic and indulgent, delightful and irritating", has been incalculably influential on indie cinema, spawning a slew of films (Juno, Garden State, Charlie Bartlett) in which precociously smart white people learn life lessons via deadpan whimsy, oddball sartorial choices and gentle indie-rock. In fact, there's been a distinctly Andersonian strand – cutesy, brainy, self-consciously stylised – to this decade's music, too. If Max Fischer from Rushmore had a record deal, he would no doubt make records as grandly quirky as Sufjan Stevens or the Decemberists. Thus far, Noah and the Whale are the only proponents of this aesthetic to hail from Twickenham. But much has changed since their 100,000-selling debut album. Former part-time members Emmy the Great and Laura Marling have established solo careers, and Marling has broken up with Fink, thus inspiring the 23-year-old frontman to write not just an album about his loss but a film (available with the deluxe edition), both called The First Days of Spring. Judging by the movie's trailer, Andersonisms abound: a friend wearing giant goggles, an old man on a swing, a slow-motion bike ride. It looks gorgeous, ambitious and somewhat more in love with craft than feeling. The perfect accompaniment, then, to the album. Some lovelorn songwriters make you wince at the acuity of their observations and the keenness of their pain; others wrap their misery around themselves like a feather duvet. Noah and the Whale, with producer Emery Dobyns, have crafted perhaps the most luxurious-sounding break-up album since Beck's Sea Change, a quantum leap from the DIY feel of their debut. The title track is majestic in its self-pity, the strings hovering like sea mist over Fink's faltering vocal – "I do believe that everyone has one chance to fuck up their life/ But like a cut-down tree I will rise again/ And I will be bigger and stronger than ever before" – for six minutes before rallying towards a spectacular climax. Blue Skies sets out like a warmed-up version of Joy Division's funereally stately Atmosphere until the Exmoor Singers of London appear bearing choral consolation. Throughout, the lushness is saved from becoming cloying by the spacious restraint of violinist Tom Hobden's marvellous arrangements. Fink's voice, which has evolved into a tender croon redolent of Lambchop's Kurt Wagner, is as gorgeous as anything that surrounds it. The album falls down only on the words he sings with it. Cliches are forgivable in break-up records – after all, there are only so many ways to say "I miss you" – but The First Days of Spring is carpeted with them wall-to-wall. Fink is "still here hoping that one day you may come back" (the title track), staying up till "four in the morning" (Our Window), asking to "go back to the start" (My Broken Heart) and comparing himself to "a fox trapped in the headlights" (Stranger). The only thing he isn't doing is sitting all alone by the telephone. Without any tellingly authentic details, one feels not so much heartache as an expert facsimile of heartache. Perhaps this is to some degree intentional. The curious mid-album interlude, comprising two untitled instrumentals and the jauntily self-referential For the Love of an Orchestra, seems like it might be an admission of artifice. Or perhaps this is simply a young man, reeling from his first big romantic calamity, and failing to find new words for age-old emotions. Despite its shortcomings, The First Days of Spring marks a welcome escape from such labels as "quirky" and "twee", with a musical maturity that requires only an equivalent lyrical magic to amount to something truly special. For Fink, there will be other girls, and other albums. cd ripped by dBpoweramp please seed

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