Noah and the Whale

This is bohemian life. Crashing in Paris to play a festival you don’t know anything about, arriving at Gare du Nord and being welcomed by some Frenchies you met a couple weeks before and who decide to take care of you, take you to wander in the streets, to courtyards, to apartments, who lead you to your hotel and then to the venue but make a dozen detours, carry your luggage and cases, get the guitars and pocket pianos out of your luggage and cases, film you all along, ask you to play everywhere. Talk about a sinecure... They never stopped smiling.

We’ve been supporting Noah and the Whale for ages, and we’ve been dreaming of doing something with them for a long time, all the more since Moon has filmed them at SXSW, and he had a strong desire to do it again. What was the occasion ? Them being in Paris for just a few hours, to play at a Inrocks / Sony party. We suggested to spend the afternoon together, and we promised only one thing: to guide them and make them arrive safe and sound...

Three cops ruined their arrival, asking us to shut down the camera right when they appeared, yellow, blue, bright, colourful, among the crowd. Their clothes, their accessories, their smiles appeared as as many promises. This would be funny, bouncing, unbridled, fresh. We were walking in the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis and they were joking all along: that story could be Urby’s quip’s, as he tried hard to remember his French, read le Figaro out loud and tried to talk us into dressing just like him and join the band.

What should be remembered of Noah and the Whale ? That they have a brazen talent for pop songs, obvious but not cheesy melodies, square but somehow free structures, impulses, pauses, staggering moments, they have the science for making a full, complex and consistent sound. That they are pretty and charming, like fictional characters, almost too easy to film. But what’s the more important to remember is that they are a band, the most exact definition of it, four individuals in harmony. Colours, wittiness, guys and instruments who match perfectly, Doug who set the pace beating on Urby’s bass, Urby who pointed his finger at Fiddle starting a violin solo, Charlie who almost said nothing and guided everyone.

In the end, we spent so much time with the band that we achieved a Take away show condensation: the métro, an apartment, an old guy yelling, people trying to catch the camera , a freight elevator... All that’s missing is only two or three kids...