NOAH AND THE WHALE – Heart Of Nowhere
1. Introduction
2. Heart Of Nowhere
3.All Through the Night
4.’Lifetime
5. Silver & Gold
6. One More Night
7. Still After All These Years
8. There Will Come A Time
9. ‘Now Is Exactly the Time
10. Not Too Late
NOAH AND THE WHALE definitely wanted to make the release of their fourth longplayer Heart Of Nowhere special. They filmed a short movie, hid six cassette copies of the album in six UK record which had to be found by the fans to unlock an album stream and since the last Sunday in April they’ve got a four week residency at the Palace Theatre in London, called A Month Of Sundays – at these four Sundays they give concerts where they present the new record and their short movie. But unfortunately Heart Of Nowhere isn’t as special as its release celebration. It is exactly what you imagined of NOAH AND THE WHALE‘s new record. Only the use of electric guitars is new to their sound (readily identifiable in All Trough The Nigh and Sill After All These Years), the rest stays the same: happy strings and easy melodies that form NOAH AND THE WHALE‘s typical folkpop/-rock sound.
It all begins with the naïve Introduction – a sweet xylophone-rippling which introduces the bands’ tame sound pretty well. Then there is the title track Heart of Nowhere which features the voice of the British singer ANNA CALVI. But somehow Charlie Fink’s convenient voice doesn’t fit to hers. They don’t mesh with each other. Even though they brang CALVI’s voice in, the song isn’t particular: it contains happy strings and a text which you can instantly sing along with-as always. They even recorded the whole record in Mark Knofpler’s studio – but sadly it didn’t change anything concerning their sound. The tracks are all highly similar and anything but young. Although the NOAH AND THE WHALE band members aren’t that old – Charlie Fink,the singer is 26- their music fits to the 40+ generation (or the 10-) but definitely not to the youth: therefore Heart Of Nowhere is simply to boring and string-overloaded. Maybe they wanted to make an album for the older generations-anyhow the population is getting older and older..