Spread the Social Love:

Jim Noir - Zooper Dooper [EP]

Self Released

by RichPickings, January 5th, 2011 and has been Read 1452 times.
Last Edited by: Chris MUG5 Maguire January 16th, 2011.

For some reason it's always felt like dyed-in-the-wool Mancunian Jim Noir - Alan Roberts to his mum - would probably have been better off with a bijou apartment located somewhere in The Village, Patrick McGoohan's open prison of the mind. This isn't because his music is particularly insidious, in fact ever since his début album Tower of Love it's been quite the opposite, but rather more due to it's openness to interpretation and it's obvious sixties roots. It's quite conceivable for instance that Zooper Dooper's title track, a bubbling near instrumental (an orchestra of ba-ba-ba's add a human flourish) that starts off sounding like Boards of Canada in an Austin Powers movie and finishes with desultory, strangled synths could've been on the Jukebox in the pub there. And any housewives kicking round would probably have had 'She Flies Away With My Love' playing loudly on their radio, it being as close to a mainstream pop song as anything else here, humming away to it whilst they ironed Number Two's shirts before he returned home after another hard day's waterboarding.

With inevitable nods to The Beatles and other classic psychedelic pop, I can confirm happily that it's Davyhulme rather than the Duma, which our Jim is more suited to hanging out in however. The follow up EP to his earlier free release Melody Junction (he's charging for this one because it's "Much better"), when he sings it still sounds like Gruff Rhys, which is clearly no bad thing, just don't expect either A) Angst or B) Recrimination.

Happy to write songs about banal subjects - 'Map' for instance he describes as "Just some general advice about sailing" - the musical backdrop continues to be retro-kitsch, yet there's a dryness about the delivery which saves the whole thing from descending into parody. 'Do You Like Games,' the best of the half dozen songs here is a case in point, little more than three minutes of low key guitar and lilting Moog, whilst our hero mock-candidly sings "...About a lady...an interesting subject that hasn't been fully explored yet." This gentle self deprecation also helps to reveal another less obvious truth, being that Roberts/Noir is in fact the sole heir to the legacy of Neil Innes, another man out of time who could find only humour in all of our paraphernalia, and then sung about it.