Review by Heather Phares
They've been described as Billie Holiday fronting the White Stripes, and while that doesn't begin to do justice to the Noisettes' originality, it's not a bad way to start talking about their sound. On their striking full-length debut, What's the Time Mr. Wolf?, the band moves from revved-up arty garage rock to soul and jazz-tinged balladry -- sometimes during the course of one song -- like it's on rails. This might not be the most natural, or expected, combination of sounds on paper, but for most of the album, it works amazingly well. It would be easy to say that singer Shingai Shoniwa is the reason for the Noisettes' musical alchemy, and with good reason: she can sing and scream with the best of them, sounding effortlessly, coolly beautiful on "Hierarchy" and fiery and fearless on "Don't Give Up." However, the rest of the Noisettes have just as much range as Shoniwa, delivering the acoustic filigrees of "Count of Monte Christo" and radical gospel-punk of "Sister Rosetta (Capture the Spirit)" with the same passion. What's the Time Mr. Wolf?'s best moments make the band's balancing act seem easy. "Scratch Your Name" and "Bridge to Canada" sound violent and hopeful, full of anthemic choruses and soaring harmonies; "Iwe" makes this approach fiercely romantic. On the album's more experimental second half, however, the band teeters a bit. Songs like the awkward "Mind the Gap" and "Cannot Even (Break Free)," which begins as smoky, hypnotic jazz and gets dangerously close to being tuneless and shrill, are more overwhelming than fascinating. Nevertheless, the Noisettes rarely let their ambitions get the better of them. Any band capable of fusing such divergent sounds and ideas so completely and compellingly is worth hearing -- and watching.
Noisettes
What's the Time, Mr. Wolf?
[Motown/Vertigo; 2007]
Rating: 5.7
It's nearly impossible not to like the fourth UK single from Noisettes' debut What's the Time, Mr. Wolf?, "Sister Rosetta (Capture the Spirit)". On it, or perhaps through it, singer Shingai Shoniwa channels the woman many consider to be one of the first guitar heroes of rock'n'roll. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was not only a gospel singer and lead guitarist of a music group, but a black woman. That her story is depressingly reserved to the dustbin of history, as a footnote rather than a minor miracle, is a tragedy. Like Tharpe, Shoniwa is a walking panopoly of cultural signifiers; an axe-wielding black frontwoman of a rock group. And like so many of her white male forerunners have done, Shoniwa pays tribute to her unrecognized hero, and offers a corrective for a half-century of popular ignorance. "Rosetta" should-- and to a degree has-- gained the London trio a measure of notice on both sides of the Atlantic.
But not, however, to the extent of Shoniwa herself. A direct descendant of Grace Jones, with elements of Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex and Ari Up of the Slits, and evoking contemporaries Karen O and Gwen Stefani in equal measure, Shoniwa has a fashion model's appearance and sense of style as performance. She bedecks herself with facepaint and hairstyles suggesting a new-wave warrior princess, and has a spastic, energetic stage presence. Wolf is her showcase, clear and true, and its greatest impression left comes from the mixture of simple, engergetic rallying cries like "Don't Give Up", "Scratch Your Name", and "Nothing to Dread", and the sort of tentative romantic vulnerability only acquired through real-life experience. "Bridge to Canada" alternates between Shoniwa missing her "sweet pea" on tour, before wishing "you'd fall but not drown," and "The Count of Monte Christo" warns exhaustedly that "there's no more honey from this bee." For its part, "IWE" is an escapist fantasy that merges the album's emotional poles: "You take your jump I'll make my leap/ Feel freedom coming, we can have it all."
As a first full-length, Wolf harbors a kineticism and untapped potential that could hint at much better things to come. Shoniwa strives to inject furious passion into every second of the record, but too often she and her sidemen seem burdened by the need to shoehorn their ideas into the rigid confines of genre, especially glossy garage-blues and squeaky Ani DiFranco-style folk. One can only imagine what could be in store if they decide to more fully explore a more inventive, polyrhythmic rock fusion (as another trio displayed on last year's wonderful Show Your Bones) that seems to be their calling. While Shoniwa has a bit of distance to travel to reach the creative level of her iconoclastic forerunners and inventive contemporaries, Wolf is a fine debut showcase of what could lie ahead for her. Including the inevitable solo career, of course.
-Eric Harvey, April 18, 2007
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