NO-MAN I: Only the Beginning
First Step in a Discographical Journey
NO-MAN
Lovesighs – An Entertainment
One Little Indian Records
*** 3/5
Intro: Looking through NO-MAN’s discography can get a little dicey. With song compilations ranging back to 1986, singles, EPs, digital-only releases, mail-in only releases and their studio albums to take into account–a total of 61 separate pieces on which they’re at least featured–AllMusic has a different album list than Progressive Rock super-site ProgArchives–and even their list doesn’t match up with NO-MAN’s own breakdown on their homepage. So if you’re going to finally embark on the long trek through their musical chronology after years of putting it off–like I am–it’s probably best to have a plan. Me, I’ll be skipping the singles and EPs for now to focus just on their full-length releases (about 13 of them). And as I make my way through, I’ll post a review on each one before moving onto the next. It’ll be a long but hopefully rewarding journey–and that’s so prog.
Probably best known as one of Steven Wilson of PORCUPINE TREE’s “other” bands, NO-MAN is the collaboration between Wilson (various instruments) and Tim Bowness (lyrics, vocals). Their first full-length release was 1992’s Lovesighs – An Entertainment, which is a collection of singles and b-sides, set up similarly to PORCUPINE TREE’s year prior debut, On the Sunday of Life.
And like a few of the early-era tracks featured in Wilson’s PT debut, Lovesighs is all about electronica. Each one of its compositions are keyboard-led, but the album itself is pretty hard to categorize. It melds together elements of dance, art pop and techno, couples that with Ben Coleman’s atmospheric violin work (which accompanies the duo in a few of their beginning records), then tops it off with Bowness’ almost brooding vocal quality. But it’s that resistance to settling down, resistance to genre that gives the piece it’s fresh and wide-eyed style. And really, I think that’s all it’s going for: to show the process of young musicians maturing, exploring what they can do with different noises and structures.
No matter what complaints may arise about the formula–and a lot of them would be warranted–there’s no doubt that it’s definitely bright with sparks of creativity and passion. Tim Bowness’ vocals have such a great quality about them, almost like every word is a struggle for him to squeeze out. And his glam rock-esque pseudo-monotone is a nice contrast against Wilson’s poppy electronic backdrops. It makes for a fun and weighty kind of pop.
What the album never quite achieves, though, is ever reaching a plateau where it feels like more than just pop electronica. Sure, it’s got the violin thrown in there to sharpen the sound, and there are complex guitar solos set against drum machines and melodies that build through slightly altered repetition. That all makes the music more interesting. But it’s hardly ever enough to elevate it to something highly emotional–except in the record’s final track, “Days in the Trees,” an amazingly simple and amazingly powerful wall of synth track, colored by a sample of a Lara Flynn Boyle monologue from Twin Peaks. That song alone, the beautiful images sprinkled throughout Boyle’s story, the introspective inflections of her voice and the perfect simplicity of Wilson’s audio, makes for enough full-body chills and the kind of eye closing, soak-it-all-in listening experience that almost warrants the album getting a higher rating than it probably deserves.
I’m glad I started on Lovesighs instead of jumping straight to their first “real” release because, just like On the Sunday of Life, you can really see the beginning stages of something bigger here, young musicians experimenting, growing, slowly becoming through each of their flight affairs with genre or sound the artists they’ll later become. Lovesighs isn’t a bad album. I’m sure I’ll listen to it for a while, maybe even go through a little phase with it, being that it’s so different than the rest of my CD collection. But at the end of the day, I bet it’ll end up in the same pile as Wilson’s other debut compilation with PORCUPINE TREE: interesting and fun as a sort of novelty, a time capsule, but just not as deep or realized as the later stuff.
next on the list: Loveblows & Lovecries – A Confession
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 1:53 pm and is filed under cd reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
