Noah's Arkweld
Fun!
Squirtgun Records

In this awesome record, Mintz explores more experimental sounds, with keyboards, trumpets and a menagerie of electronic squeaks and squawks, bleebs and burbles. The album starts off, as the title suggests: Fun!. The first track Good Morning is a smooth intriguing and well written way to kick off the disk. The experimental sounds make what may otherwise have been a fairly ordinary song, into something far more captivating. Like many of the other tracks on the album, it is followed by some neat noise that passes for a remix. The album then immediately plunges into a more somber feel, taking the listener, with ease and confidence into Noah's "closet". Closet is the first of a series of tracks with a more somber and quiet theme. Lyrics like "its a cold cruel world I know, but I'd like to think I'm not alone" and music suggestive of waves on a beach set the tone for the bulk of the album. reflective, philosophical, blunt and contemplative. Some of the tracks, like Megan and Granted tell fairly disturbing stories of coldness, pain and love.

Perhaps the most brilliant track on the album is, Slow a song written from the point of view of a mentally handicapped child. This song is reminiscent of some of Noah's songs from hHead (particularly Remedial) in theme. Noah, quite easily seems to take an honest, sympathetic, yet humorous character perspective for the song. Showing us a world of applesauce and meano's. Finishing with demented noises, that accentuate one's inability to really see the situation any other way.

Noah has an uncanny ability to take ordinary, commonplace feelings and situations and make them poignant enough to captivate the listener. Telling stories, of everything from childhood memories to the sadness of aging to sexual frustration. All of this is topped off with Noah's crooning and passionate voice. abundant ambient noises, and thoughts that go through everyone's mind at some point in their lives.

Noah is truly an admirable singer-songwriter with talent, ingenuity, and a way of painting visual images and emotions with sound, that is seldom found among popular music. If you like hHead, or even if you don't, I highly recommend Noah's Arkweld. It is quite different, and is very well done and intimate. I'm sure I would be hard pressed to find a better album in the remainder of the year.

Available for $12 Canadian from: Squirtgun Records, 684 queen St. west, Box 167, Toronto Ontario, Canada m6j 1e6.

Copyright © 1997 Laura Bowman