Night Noise Team: Slow Release

Album releases
Written By Chris Singleton

Album: Slow Release
Released: 16 May 2011
Label: Permwhale Recordings 

Night Noise Team are a Venn diagram of influences and tangents, nationalities and noises. Hailing from Edinburgh via Ireland and France the four-piece frequently defy any attempt to pigeonhole their music. Described as "a Franco-Italian, Scots-Irish sonic car-crash - the UN of pop" by Isthismusic.com, Night Noise Team were chosen to grace the famous T-Break stage at T in the Park ’10, a jumping-off platform for a who’s who of recent Scottish breakthrough artists.

It’s hard to describe Night Noise Team’s sound concisely: dark strains of Joy Division and Interpol here, the pop sensibilities of Franz Ferdinand and The Buzzcocks there and through it all something much less recognisable, something sometimes shockingly close to the truly original. It’s pop savvy combined with a ferocious, willful desire to be cuttingly, viscerally different. It’s as though they achieve moments of pop genius precisely so they can, with a wry smile, take a completely unexpected turn and force their sprawling sonic vision in an entirely different direction. 

Night Noise Team are art-rock in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time and frankly it’s refreshing. The counterpoint between recognisable indie-rock and fractured pop-noir betrays an intelligence and depravity unmatched in current music climes.

To listen to Slow Release is to succumb to Sean Ormsby’s distinctive vocal. Falling somewhere between Morrissey’s laconic drawl, the gentle Scottish-isms of Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch and the desperate fragility of Bombay Bicycle Club’s Jack Steadman, it’s an idiosyncratic voice, both spoken and sung, that unites and propels Night Noise Team’s every move.

On Menolick, Night Noise Team show they know exactly how to put together a Manics-inspired dark rock song with a haunting, associative lyrical power that suggests more than it commits. It’s a towering achievement of a song for a first album, almost bursting with ideas and the kind of taut, focused energy that has already made it a live signature of sorts.

Then there’s the seductive, bass-driven You Won, something far removed from Menolick yet unquestioningly united by Sean Ormsby’s wounded vocal and darkly clever word play. You Won speaks to the hips in the same way that Menolick speaks to the heart.

On Menolick Ormsby croons “I can’t believe that you can’t see some kind of beauty in this mess”. It’s a sentiment that applies back to Slow Release as a whole. Much more than the sum of its parts, Slow Release tempts and teases; just as you’d expect it takes its own sweet time and then floods your system like Temazepam: slow release, hypnotic and thoroughly intoxicating.

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Chris Singleton
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