Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Niobe :: "Up Hill And Down Dale"From White Hats (Tom Lab; 2006)
Niobe’s White Hats sounds about what you’d expect from a Mouse on Mars chanteuse digging into various forms of folk music, except that it isn’t very deconstructive. Instead, Niobe’s development as a songstress has led to excursions which sound cool with modernity but rarely flirt with overt stylistic showboating. The “problem” that then arises is this: too much depends on one’s enjoyment of whatever niche Niobe’s wooing, and, subjectively speaking, there’s only so much to be felt in chic, electronic-tinged excavations of flower power, smoky lounge, and other AM radio mines. That’s not to say a lot of it ain’t great and sophisticated and whatever, I just won’t be bumpin’ it at parties without wine and cheese.
However, being that I’ll take my jager with some “Can You Get To That,” Niobe’s got me by the gut when she’s cooing her way through a programmed interpolation of bop into gospel and that into an alternate universe version of Sade that I actually like. The press release totally misses the mark when it calls this track “hip-hop,” but I appreciate the description because it made me pay attention, and paying attention paid off. Clapping hats, subdued bass line, supermarket synth, vinyl-drop BGVs chiming about, uh… Jack the Ripper? I dunno. It’s all a tad winsome, though, which helps excuse it of being sickly addictive. Perhaps the song’s greatest achievement is that it goes pretty much nowhere, and I. Don’t. Care. Sure, in the last minute elements condense and Niobe starts croon-styling, but there’s really little-to-no appreciable increase in the song’s energy or emotion. Rather, you just realize that this last minute of the song is the whole song, and the three minutes leading up to it were a factory belt displaying the bones and organs. Niobe’s the skin and heart of the thing, its cohesion and core, front and center without the help of a spotlight: another impressive achievement when dealing with the tendency of pastiche to distract. I haven’t enjoyed any 4 a.m. drinking to “Up Hill and Down Dale” yet, but it’s on the to-do list.
Coming soon to a podcast near you. Hopefully.
Chet Betz :: 5 September 2006 |
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